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All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy A Division of The College of Fine Arts and Communications, Brigham Young University. Employment Information | EEO Public File Report (06-07) | (05-06) http://www.byub.org/livingessentials/transcript.asp (2 of 2)10/31/2007 1:15:34 PM Rebecca Cressman: Hi I’m Rebecca Cressman, and this is Living Essentials, with helpful ideas to enrich and simplify our everyday lives. Today we’re talking about emergency preparedness. We’ve been hearing about food storage and 72 hour kits for years and it’s something that many of us have a tendency to say, “We’ll get to th tomorrow.” But the events of September 11 changed that for everyone, especially for members of the Manhattan fifth ward in New York City. The devastation unfolded right before their eyes. Luci Holman: I remember waking up and looking out my windows and it was just the clearest blue day and I was looking out my window because I was going to head right downtown to the World Trade Centers. nd Ron Robison: I actually worked in the 72 floor of the World Trade Center. I usually leave at 5 or 5:30 in the morning and go and work out and then I get to my office about 7:30 but on this occasion I decided to stay home and so I was still here at the apartment when all this started to unfold. Megumi Vogelmann: I was doing exercise in the living room and suddenly an enormous sound, and the whole building shook. Thomas Vogelmann: When it happened she came racing into the bedroom to get me and said, “A bomb went off in the World Trade Center.” And I went out to our balcony, looked around at the World Trade Center and I told her, “That’s not a bomb, it was a plane, can’t you see the shape on the side of the building? See where the wings and the main part of the fuselage.” It was very obvious that a plane had gone into the building and of course everyone thought that it was a terrible mistake. Nobody realized at that moment that it was an act of terrorism. th Glade Holman: The week of September 11 I happened to be in Georgia and somebody said, “Aren’t you from New York, you should, there’s something here on the news, you should take a look.” It was before the second plane had hit and it was still the speculation that, you know, it was a FedEx plane or it was a small plane or it was an accident. Susan Robison: And all of a sudden, we heard this huge loud roar, and what it was, it was the second plane and the second plane came in right over our building and then we heard the huge explosion. So we knew something was very wrong. Glade Holman: You start to realize, this is – I haven’t thought about it in a long time – This is not an ordinary event, that people I know work in those buildings and live literally just feet away from there, and this is not going to be something simple and easy. Susan Robison: We watched on top of our building until the first tower fell. Ron Robison: I heard a loud rumble, it sounded like an airplane. It was a loud vuvuvuvu and then a crash. (loud rumbles and screams) And then I saw people running, from my dock, and I could see them on the ground running saying, “Get out, run run, get out, get out.” Thomas Vogelmann: The cloud of smoke and dust came rushing toward us, it was just fiercesome. And people were running up the west side highway, trying to get away as fast as possible, many running for their lives. Rebecca Cressman: As we all know, soon after that, the North Tower fell too, and everyone realized that this disaster had changed the world. It also changed the way we feel about our own safety. Michael Stever: A lot of the recent, national and worldwide focus on being prepared for acts of terrorism, has heightened awareness to emergency preparedness and kind of, driven the message home a little bit. However, we do see the same thing occurring after a major tornado or hurricane or earthquake or a major winter storm. There’s always this heightened level of awareness. Randy Frank: Emergencies are basically all the same. You have an event and then you go to recover from that event. So if you prepare for that event, you put together your 72 hour kits, and your items that you need to take with you, and you prepare for a variety of events. An earthquake, a flood, a mudslide, whatever it may be, but the preparation is basically the same for all. Michael Stever: One of my favorite emergency management slogans is the farmer who said, “I can sleep when the wind blows.” The correlation to this of course is that when there are troubled times and the wind is blowing, that his farm is secure. Things are in place, they’re tied down, and he knows exactly what he’s going to do, first second and third if the wind really starts blowing hard. That gives people a certain peace of mind and allows you to focus on other things. Once you know that that is taken care of, doing your duty to people that you have stewardship over, getting to work on time, taking care of the family. th Rebecca Cressman: On September 11 , shortly after the second tower fell, Glade Holman left Atlanta and began driving home. As an LDS Bishop he was very concerned about the welfare of his ward. While he was on the road, his wife and other ward leaders began the overwhelming task of finding each and every member. Glade Holman: I basically didn’t sleep for three nights as we were just, from the time I left Georgia driving through that thing for 17 hours, landed here, finally back here in the house, and then coordinating the efforts. Finding people, where they were, making sure they were someplace where they had a roof over their heads. Thomas Vogelmann: We received calls from quite a number of people, I think all the members that knew where we lived called, that were aware of what had happened. We received wonderful support from the church and concern from them. Glade Holman: We were emailing lists back and forth. “We found this one did you find that one?” “No, we got this one, did you get that one?” And we just had a story for every single name in the end. When we had an excel spreadsheet with the time that they were contacted, the comment, and that’s a spreadsheet I don’t want to live, but it’s got the story for every single person. “Talked to the doorman who saw him yesterday, he’s okay.” Or “Met the sister, says they’re fine.” And finally, I could not personally myself let it go, until I had every name signed off. Rebecca Cressman: With the help of ward leadership, Bishop Holman was able to locate every member of the ward and confirm that all were alive and okay. As night th fell on September 11 , the rescue efforts continued. Many of those who lived nearby had not yet been evacuated. They had however lost power and water. Megumi Vogelmann: The hallway is completely dark without the light, so everybody opened their door and kept it open, and we could see each other and we went in each other’s apartment. “Are you okay?” And so on, worried about each other, and then somebody said, “I don’t have any water,” and I invited neighbors and shared my candles, water and we were really one, united that night. Rebecca Cressman: Eventually, all of lower Manhattan was evacuated. That meant members of the fifth ward didn’t have access to their food storage. They had to rely on help from friends and relief agencies instead. But there are other emergency situations where it’s vital to have food storage within reach. Extended power outages, truck driver strike, or even losing a job. For the Richards family of Falmouth, Maine, it was an ice storm. Bruce and Nancy Richards enjoy living on the beautiful eastern seaboard, but the winters in Maine can be severe. This was the case in January of 1998 when a terrible ice storm hit. Throughout the state, tree branches heavy with ice were knocking down power lines, smashing cars, and blocking roads. Most Mainers found themselves without power for up to two weeks. Within hours, grocery store shelves were virtually empty. And trucks were unable to get in to restock them. Without power, food in refrigerators and freezers was quickly going bad. Many of them found themselves in a situation where they needed food, they needed heat, and they needed these things right away. Bruce Richards: Unlike I guess many of our neighbors who were rushing out to the store to try and stock up on food, we didn’t even think about it, because we just go to the basement anyway to prepare our meals. And so, that wasn’t really an issue for us at all. Rebecca Cressman: The Richards have always maintained a supply of food storage in their basement. For them, it’s just a way of life. Bruce Richards: We sort of look at it as a reservoir, a pool of foodstuffs if you will, and so when Nancy shops, she just buys to put into the reservoir. Whenever we fix a meal, we just go to the food storage and take the ingredients out of that so that it’s always being replenished and I would say that almost all of our meals come to us that way. Rebecca Cressman: Not only do they stock their shelves from the local grocery store, but they also grow a garden, things like potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and carrots, will end up in their food storage and will be used throughout the year. But for the Richards, gardening together is more than just for food storage. It’s also a time to talk, a time to think, and a time to learn about the law of the harvest. Nancy Richards: I think when President Kimball told everyone to grow a garden, it wasn’t necessarily the food he was concerned about, it’s the, you learn a different sort of pace of life when you have to wait for things to grow and when you plant the pumpkin seed, you’re not going to get a pumpkin until you go through the natural cycle of what it takes to grow a pumpkin, so you learn patience, you learn those things that our forefathers knew just because they were tied to the land and those are things I think President Kimball knew we needed to know. Rebecca Cressman: After the ice storm when temperatures dropped to 20 below at night, a source of heat was another big concern for many. Once again, the Richards were prepared. Bruce Richards: We actually have three different energy sources to heat our home and the wood stove is the most useful when all the electricity’s out. And so we try during the course of the year to chop wood and save it and dry it and have it ready. Rebecca Cressman: Their preparation beforehand allowed the Richards to not only survive the ice storm, but to thrive in it. They were even able to reach out to their neighbors and share what they had. Nancy Richards: We called everybody and invited them over and we had a big chili cook-off and I had some frozen bread dough downstairs in the freezer, thawed that and made fried bread in a big castiron frying pan, and admission to the party was a bucket of water. One bucket of water was good for a free dinner. And we just sat around and visited with each other and it was a fun experience. Bruce Richards: In a sense, it’s kind of an adventure, you know, when that occurs. And I wouldn’t say it was a disaster in the sense that people were worried about dying or anything like that, but it was an inconvenience and people and neighbors had to pull together and help each other more. It almost, it feels like you need to have a little mini-disaster every once in a while just to remember and learn again that you should watch out for each other. Lisa Harkness: President Benson gave counsel saying that we should not go into debt to get our food storage or to become prepared for emergencies. Instead he said we needed to realign our priorities and if that means that we need to forego a vacation, or forego a bigger TV set or an upgrade in our car, or perhaps even smaller things like movie tickets or eating out every weekend, and we needed to readjust our priorities. And he actually said the words, “And we need to do this now.” Leslie Probert: People find that overwhelming because planning for a whole year’s supply is a big job, certainly trying to figure out what you would store, how you would rotate it, how you’re going to finance all of that, where you’re going to put it in your home. Those are things people find are very difficult to figure out. The key is to keep it simple. Lisa Harkness: I know lots of families who decide they’re going to have a food storage budget for their family and they set aside X amount of dollars every week or every month and then they use that money to get a little bit at a time, so they either get small packages of things or things in bigger quantities and that food storage budget then allows them to have that dedicated, they don’t spend that money on other things, and what you’ll find is, getting just a little bit of something will encourage you and will get you excited about getting more. Leslie Probert: The basic foods that have been recommended for many years are inexpensive, they’re space efficient and that means that they’re a very good place to start. Those basic foods would include: wheat and other grains, legumes, sugar and honey, oil, salt, garden seeds, and water. Lisa Harkness: The church actually has a booklet, it’s a brown booklet and it’s called Essentials of Home Production and Storage and in there there’s a list of how much to store for each person for a year. So, if you look at those quantities and you times them out by the number of people in your family, you’ll get a large amount of food. Don’t be overwhelmed or don’t be discouraged because the amount seems so large. Start maybe with ten pounds of something, twenty pounds of something. You need enough water to get you through two weeks, and for that it’s recommended that we have fourteen gallons per person. Now that’s not a whole lot of water, but it’s enough for simple hygiene and it’s enough for cooking, and instead of keeping those barrels of wheat in the basement actually start using some of that wheat, start experimenting with some of it so that you know how to fix it in an emergency and your family is accustomed to eating it. Leslie Probert: Unfortunately in the past there have been recipes that float around that people try and they’re just not that good, so that has caused people to decide in their minds that this is an impossibility that food storage never really could taste good anyway, so why would I even try to find good tasting recipes. It is possible to find very good tasting recipes using only stored food and it is well worth the search to find them. I can have a good food storage recipe put together in about five minutes. These recipes are so fast, that even a husband can fix them, when the wife is busy, teenagers can fix food storage meals because they are so easy and fast. If you’re using dried vegetables, they’re already cut up so children can learn, fixing a food storage recipe because they’re so simple. Lisa Harkness: Different families and different localities will find that they have to adjust how they store their food storage in different ways. A family in Southern California may only have room to store their food storage in a hot garage and that may be the only place because of the size of a home, or an apartment or a condo or whatever. In an apartment you may only have room to store food storage in a closet, or under a bed, or to actually make a lovely side table out of stacks of your boxes of wheat or whatever. Whatever works for you in your situation is what you need to do. Megumi Vogelmann: We lifted the bed way up, that I’m kind of short so I have to get in the bed by stool, and so we have plenty of water, wheat, and then I have lots of dry food in the jar and then I have fresh food, canned that you have to use within two years, all in the front of the shelves. Rebecca Cressman: When it comes to food storage, anyone living in an apartment knows you have to be creative. Curtis and Rhondalynn Paige live with their four children in an apartment in Pasadena, CA. They too have found innovative ways to make it work. Curtis Paige: We have a coat closet in the hall that I put some shelving up in and we put most of our food supply in there and then in one of the bedroom closets, we’ve dedicated a small portion of that to store water. Rhondalynn Paige: We have two cribs; we put baby supplies things like that, toiletries, under cribs and under bunk beds. We Michael Stever: An interesting point about storing water is that it should be stored in small enough containers that could be carried. Water is heavy, anything that’s designed for long term storage of liquid is good, stay away from milk cartons, stay away from Clorox bottles, things like that, the two-liter pop bottles are generally considered a good source. They’re small enough that a child could carry it if they had to and it’s easy to rotate that water, pour it out and refill it once a year if you need to. So, remember what you store that you may have to carry and if you have a 50 gallon drum of water nobody could roll it out and it probably won’t fit in the Volkswagen. Rebecca Cressman: The Paige’s live right between two fault lines and not far from Northridge where in 1994 a terrible earthquake hit measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, the quake caused severe stretch-roll damage, displaced thousands, and took 51 lives. Being prepared for this kind of an emergency, where there is literally no warning, is obviously very important to the Paige’s in their ward they serve as emergency preparedness coordinators for their area. Every other month they host an emergency preparedness meeting with neighbors and members of the ward who live close by. They review their emergency response plan, update contact information, and discuss ways to become more prepared for an earthquake or any other emergency that may occur. Many in the group are Ham radio and CPR certified. They have designated an empty lot up the street as a meeting place should they have to evacuate their homes. Each meeting they offer preparedness items that can be purchased at a discount, such as first aid kits and flashlights, wheat grinders and water barrels. They’ve learned that by working together, they can be more prepared should disaster strike. In their own family, the Paige’s discuss their emergency plan with their children and try to reassure them that should something happen they know what they need to do. Rhondalynn Paige: To be prepared, I mean is just a calming thing, just to know that we can take care of our family and we can take care of others if they need it. Michael Stever: In creating a family emergency plan, look first to the type of emergencies that you might face and what are the most common emergencies that happen to families. Extended power outages because of storms is very common. Fires in the home, hazardous material spills, things like that. So we actually need to plan out what would we do. If we have to get out of this house, how can we do it? Is there more than one way out of the house? Just reminding the family what the smoke detector sounds like, what the carbon monoxide detector sounds like, where will we meet once we get out? So we plan that out as a family, we work through it and then decide to practice it. Randy Frank: My family every once in a while, usually on a Friday night because there’s no school the next day, about 10:30 or 11 o’clock at night I will intentionally set off the fire alarms in my house to see how my children are going to react, and if you’re standing outside my house you see kids flying out windows because they all know that that’s their escape route. th Rebecca Cressman: The tragic events of September 11 motivated the members of the Manhattan fifth ward to be better prepared. Now, virtually every family has an emergency response plan and 72 hour kits. Glade Holman: We’ve done it through our Enrichment nights, we continue to do follow ups on it, adaptations to it, and kind of brought in the stuff, everyone kind of made them. We’ve got ours, it’s more than a backpack because we’ve got three little kids that can’t wear theirs. Megumi Vogelmann: 72 hour kits, I have it and I always have it right next to the bed, so when something happens I can just grab it. Kaia Seefelt: We kept actually a camping lantern, you know, the Coleman camping lantern, next to our bed so that in case something were to happen at nighttime, we have a lantern there. I keep one, a flashlight in my dresser drawer. We keep our backpacks right at the front door and they’re inside the front hall closet so that they can easily be taken and go. Dan Seefelt: We have all of our church documents and our journals and things like that, closer to the door as opposed to placed in different closets throughout the house, and it makes it a lot easier in case there’s another problem, we can just grab it and go. Michael Stever: So for that first 72 hours you want to have things that the family will eat that don’t require a lot of preparation, maybe that don’t even require cooking, that you can eat cold if you had to. That’s going to help you a long ways. You may not be in a position to grind too many pounds of wheat when you evacuated your home. Rebecca Cressman: When preparing 72 hour kits, there are some basic items you want to include, such as water, food, and clothing. Of course, depending on where you live and your particular circumstances, there are a number of additional items you’ll want to consider. Some people even have mini 72 hour kits for work, for their car, or even for their purse. Megumi Vogelmann: Every time I go out, even now when I go out, my purse has a miniature 72 hour kit. I have flashlight in there, of course cell phone I always have, and make sure battery is on, and I have a kit of band aids, ointment, everything in a little kit in my purse. Rebecca Cressman: A lot of us have been fortunate enough not to have to rely on our food storage or 72 hour kids. We may even wonder, why should we have them at all? But the very nature of emergencies is that we don’t know where or when they will occur. And there’s peace in mind in knowing that we’re ready, just in case. Megumi Vogelmann: Whether it’s wasted or not, we did obey the prophet, that’s what counts, how obedient we are. Susan Robison: I think it’s more important that we were prepared than that we had to use it. Also it may be that we’re not the ones that have to use it, it may be that someone else needs it and we’re able to offer it to someone else. Glade Holman: I could never imagine actually using a year supply for a year. What kind of disaster? The world must be at an end if that were the case, but I could imagine that our year supply gets split twelve ways between twelve families and lasts for a month. So I think it’s not only for ourselves that we’re prepared, but so that we can help others. Lisa Harkness: Some people think, “I get food storage and it’s mine and I hold on to it and it will help me in an emergency.” But actually the opposite is true. Just as with all gifts that our Heavenly Father gives us, he gives them to us so that we can share and help and enrich other people’s lives. Should food storage or the way we prepare for emergencies be any different? Really he helps us prepare so that we can help others of his children. Rebecca Cressman: Understandably, preparedness is of great importance to members of the Manhattan fifth ward. Every family has taken steps to be more prepared should another emergency happen. But they have also gained a spiritual th preparedness that has developed through the events of September 11 and its aftermath. Glade Holman: I think for everyone, in my ward particularly, it ended up being an opportunity to exercise faith in the Lord and when you exercise faith it’s always rewarded and strengthens your faith and with such a tragic, heartfelt, just despicable event that was so heinous, so much good came from it. It’s almost like you feel tighter as a family, as a ward because you’ve shared those experiences and you’ve exercised the faith together and come to those questionings and shared that group process almost of mourning and coming to resolution and having your prayers be answered and the spirit comfort you and help you make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. Rebecca Cressman: Now to be ready for an emergency, we don’t need to go through life thinking a tragedy is just around the corner. We just need to take steps to be prepared and remember, what’s important is that everyday we do the small things, the essentials, that add up to a balanced and more fulfilling life. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time on Living Essentials. >>Next on Living Essentials, we’re talking about canning for keeps. Perhaps you’ve never done any canning, or you just want to brush up on the basics. Today we’ll show you just how easy canning can be, and we’ll give you a few tips that maybe you haven’t heard of. Stay tuned. Rebecca Cressman: Welcome to Living Essentials. I’m Rebecca Cressman, and today we’re talking about canning. In recent years, the popularity of canning has dropped off quite a bit. For many people, it just doesn’t seem cost effective or maybe even worth the time and the energy. But if it’s done correctly, it can be a very satisfying and rewarding process. Joining me today to show us how it’s done is Teresa Hunsaker. Teresa is an educator with the Utah State University extension. Welcome. Teresa Hunsaker: Thank you. Rebecca: Now first of all, tell us why should we can? Teresa: You bet. I think there’s probably many reasons why people can, but for me, it’s a matter of convenience. It’s kind of like time in a bottle just waiting on the shelf for me to come home on one of those hurried evenings and want to put a meal together for my family and kids. And I have lots of options when I have some home-bottled products ready to go. Rebecca: There are a lot of reasons why some people have kind of pulled away from it. A lot of the canning that I have to do, for example, in the summer, it’s already hot and kind of sweaty, you’ve got to pick – I mean, stem, and there’s so many bottles, and you know, it just doesn’t seem economical sometimes. I could just go to the store and get a case of cans. What makes it worth it? Teresa: Well, there’s probably for many different people reasons why it’s worth it for them. Maybe perhaps it’s worth it because of the overall quality and the color and the flavor and the texture – I think it’s a little bit better than the commercially prepared counterpart. But also, if you think about it, if you already have all of your canning supplies, your jars, your equipment, the tools and everything that you need, those can be used over and over and over again, and so I don’t have the economics of having to re- purchase those through time. If I have a garden, if I have my own fruit trees or things like that, or have access to those products inexpensively, then it does make it economical and worth it that way. But it’s true – in the heat of the summer when I’m standing in the kitchen and all of that produce is staring me in the face, it can be a little discouraging. But I also have to remember, too, that for many people it’s kind of an intrinsic value. It’s important to them to be able to know how to can, to be able to put food by, and have some bottles on their shelves--in kind of a preparedness, self-sufficiency attitude. Rebecca: I like the idea you were saying that on a hurried day, because so many of us are busy, that you actually have laid out in front of you in beautiful glass some of the food that you can prepare. But are there some foods that are better than others to can with? Teresa: There are. And one of the recommendations I would make right from the start would be to know which ones are better for canning than others, and our canning guides will help us with that, The Ball Book or the USDA Canning Guide. But as you’re preparing to can and looking at the options, definitely making selections of good quality produce – if it’s fruit, I want to make sure that it isn’t bruised, that it’s not overripe, that it isn’t damaged and skin broken and things like that. And the very same with my 1