September is National Emergency Preparedness Month and Castle Country Radio was able to sit down with Emergency Preparedness Planner, Eric Anderson to discuss what they do for the community.

“Being prepared it can kind of be overwhelming at first. If you think about preparedness there’s a lot that is involved in it. But when I think about it, I think about it as, expanding our options to mitigate risks. So, the more prepared we are as individuals also the more we’re prepared and capable of helping other people. When we think about emergency preparedness often times its good to think about things that happen around us,” said Anderson. Emergencies to consider are like wildfires, house fires, and chemical spills on roadways or railways. It’s the “what if” scenarios that lead us to develop a plan for our family.

It is impossible to be over-prepared for these situations. “If you think about it, you have medical insurance, you have dental insurance, we have life insurance, and emergency preparedness capabilities are just an extension of that insurance to make sure that we are prepared when things do go wrong in everything. Something happens to everyone sometimes,” said Anderson. It’s important that families have a preparedness plan for their household.

The first step in developing a preparedness plan for the entire family is to sit down together and discuss the “what if’s” scenarios. “So if something happens and the kids are at school, what does mom do, what does dad do, what does grandma do, what does grandpa do? If something happens while you are at work, if something happens when you’re traveling, you should have a series of processes that you go through in collecting your family. Making sure everybody knows who to contact and that involves having an emergency contact list up to date. Knowing where medical equipment is, if there happens to be a medical emergency, knowing how to use it, knowing how to contact 9-1-1 and just going through that process,” stated Anderson. Making sure the family is on the same page when it comes to emergencies is very important so it doesn’t add to the chaos of an already stressful situation.

“Utah has one of the best websites in the nation and its’ called https://beready.utah.gov/ On that, it has a bunch of different check lists, its has processes that you go through, it has a checklist for how to make a family emergency plan, a communications plan, things that you should store, food supplies, water, medication. A lot of times we tend to forget about our pets, but they’re an important part of our families, making sure that we have them taken care of, and it’s a great resource,” explained Anderson. For further information on Emergency Preparedness individuals can contact the Southeastern Utah Health Department at (435) 637-3671.