We Need To Talk To Our Neighbors About Disasters
Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash
The go-to advice I hear a lot when fighting fascism is to make connections with those around you. It’s advice I’ve given before, too. As I write in a climate change advice article: “Make a plan to introduce yourself to [your neighbor]. If you haven’t already, knock on their door, say hi, and ask about their days.”
Yet talking and knowing your neighbors is really a shorthand for building community with those who are around you. The goal is to have people in your physical proximity who you can rely on. People, you can ask for help (and vice versa) when you need a package picked up, are short on a particular food, need a kid or pet watched, need a driveway shoveled, and all the other things, both big and small, that we rely on others for.
Where the “talk with your neighbors” advice often falls short is how to develop relationships with the people close to you who you don’t click with. Sometimes, you do say hello to your neighbors, and it doesn’t go well. Their schedule is too busy. They have no similar interests to you. Maybe you just find them annoying. How do you build community, then?
That’s where a disaster plan comes in.
Planning for a disaster is not a solitary affair
Disasters are an inevitable part of life and an increasingly more common one with climate change, and they can potentially be mitigated when you properly prepare for them.
The specifics of those preparations will depend heavily on your local environment and the type of disaster most frequent in your area (e.g., fire, flood, tornado, etc.). It is generally advised that you follow your state or local polity’s recommendations, but even considering this, there are general things you need to decide on, such as:
Where will you evacuate in the case of said disaster, and how are you getting to that place safely?
What parts of your home will you need to shut off or reinforce as you flee or huddle inside?
What items will you store in advance to help with your evacuation or in the event the grid is cut off (see bugout bags)?
These are all great questions to start with (and you can find many more out there). One of the first things suggested with most disaster preparedness is to make an emergency plan to go over how you will navigate your home, work, and neighborhood when a disaster strikes.
Yet, when you go to look up these questions, there is usually a bias toward nuclear families. When we look at FEMA’s preparedness guide, the family is overwhelming front and center: “Understand the risks you and your family may face,” it advises under its first step for preparing for disasters. It also advises you to focus on your community eventually, but in preparing for disasters, it claims, you start with your family's unique needs first.
And that’s a problem because not everyone can start that preparedness alone. Some people live by themselves, either permanently or temporarily. How does a single person hundreds of miles from their family handle a disaster when they are sick or bedridden? How does an elderly person with reduced mobility?
Even if you are the picture of perfect health, what happens when there are logistical issues that require coordination? If, for example, a wildfire is coming in, and you have an adjoining wooden fence with your neighbor, the day of the fire is the worst time to have to confer with them on if they are okay with you chainsawing the fence down so it doesn't bring fire to your property.
Vulnerabilities will inevitably require that you coordinate with those around you, and that doesn't just include family members.
Whether that’s helping with the distribution of sandbags to stop water from rising, checking in on sick and elderly neighbors who might be left to fend for themselves otherwise, or distributing food, much more can be accomplished much more quickly when working in tandem with other people.
Approaching your neighbor
I’ve hopefully made the case for why disaster preparedness requires cooperation with more people than just yourself and your nuclear family. The natural question becomes how to broach the subject with your neighbor so that these preparations can go smoothly.
The scale of this will depend very much on how dense your community is, but the process starts more or less the same. After you have begun a disaster checklist of what you will need to do when a disaster strikes, you will have a sense of some of the areas that overlap with your neighbors. I used the example of a joint fence earlier, but other examples might include a shared wall, a precariously hanging tree or electric pole, a very mediocre elevator in your building, and more.
I would approach your neighbors and talk about your specific concerns with them. For example, saying: “Hey neighbor, we’ve been having a lot of wildfires (disasters) recently, and I am concerned about what will happen if the fence we share ever catches on fire (joint concern). You down to talk about what we should do if that were to ever happen?”
The ideal would be for you to settle on how to share that responsibility. Maybe one of you has a chainsaw and will cut down X feet of the fence leading up to your houses while the other clears the cut-down wood. Whatever the plan may be, make sure that you create a way to talk with one another the day of (a text thread, a signal or WhatsApp group, etc.) so you can coordinate if and when such a plan is ever needed.
The conversation will hopefully evolve as they or you bring up other concerns that both of you would be willing to address together.
And bam, you’ve just made a connection with your neighbor.
The next step is to gauge the scale of disaster preparedness already in your neighborhood. The ideal situation is that your neighborhood already has an emergency plan or network in place, and if that’s the case, it's a simple matter of plugging yourself into it. I would approach your Neighborhood association, council, commission or what have you to see what plans they have.
If that structure doesn’t exist, you (and preferably others you trust in your community) will have to begin the long process of reaching out to people, such as your neighborhood association, to establish this network. This will involve organizing skills like getting people to come to meetings, so if that's work you are interested in, I am linking a guide here.
The reason why you want to do this is that prepping for every eventuality is prohibitively expensive and often impossible. Not everyone in your neighborhood needs a grill or a HAM radio, etc., but if one person is willing to share that resource during a disaster, then it improves everyone's overall preparedness. As the guide I linked above argues:
“For example, in the aftermath of a hurricane, there’s really no need for every house on your block to have a chainsaw, When the power is out, one or two families with BBQ grills can host the others for an outdoor dinner! Not every household needs to have a trained ham radio operator; a couple of enthusiastic hams can provide important emergency communications for the whole neighborhood.”
At the end of this process, you should have a better sense of what the people in your neighborhood will do during a disaster, and that will only strengthen the bonds with those around you.
A disastrous conclusion
It's hard to develop a community in 21st-century America. We are so atomized as a society that most prep is viewed through an individualist lens where people fixate on how to make the perfect bugout bag or have a decades worth of food in their basements, but this approach is misguided because you will most likely be able to lean on other people.
Developing a disaster plan with your neighbors only requires a desire for mutual protection. You don’t need to like each other, so it’s far easier to get someone to agree to do it, and before you know it, you’ve built a relationship where none previously existed.
These connections are what we will need to draw upon in the years ahead.