This morning I write with a heavy heart. Hurricane Irene is swirling in the Atlantic.  The projected paths as of 8 am on Friday August 26 predict it will hit most of the eastern seaboard beginning tomorrow.  Officials are advising evacuation in some areas and voluntary evacuation in others.

The governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley, gave some great advice last evening on CNN.  He told his citizens that if they will be sheltering in place, they need to have enough supplies to take care of their own families for 72 hours.  He emphasized that there WILL be power outages, there WILL be fallen trees and other damage.  The emergency response personnel will be overwhelmed up and down the coast, they cannot be everywhere, and it's everyone's responsibility to prepare. 

This morning there are wide reports of stores running out of bottled water, batteries and ready-to-eat foods.  The problem is that it's human nature to put things off until the last day or two.  Preparedness should be a 365 day plan.

I am not perfect with infallible foresight, no sir-ree.  I got bitten by the preparedness bug after 9/11. We have bottled water and had lots of canned food and dried foods squirreled away. I dedicated one cupboard for my preparedness pantry.  Great, right?  Well, about a month ago our son, who was home from college for the summer, asked me, "Mom-when  was the last time you checked the freshness dates on all of these foods?"   "I dunno," I said.  "They may be a couple of years old."

My son took it upon himself to go through the food stock and cull out the things that were past their prime which, as it turned out, was everything.  I came home and found all of the stuff bagged up for the garbage. "Eric! What have you done!" I said. He started handing me a few cans and said, "Look at the sell-by dates on these! In an emergency, would you actually eat this stuff? " Gulp, no. Almost everything was dated 2006.  [cringe] That's all we'd need in a disaster; botulism on top of everything else.

My point is that preparedness is an ongoing task. It's getting supplies together, but then regularly checking to see that the pantry is up to date.  The 10^th anniversary of 9/11 is just a few days away.  Maybe we can set 9/11 as our annual dates to check on our supplies and make sure we're ready.

Here is FEMA's latest statement about Hurricane Irene: http://blog.fema.gov/2011/08/irene-update-10-preparations-happening.html   Here is a link to the CDC's family preparedness advice. http://emergency.cdc.gov/preparedness .  To our NCFR members on the East Coast, I'm thinking about you and praying for the best.  I hope that in a few days we can all sing "Goodnight, Irene" with no tragedies.

Now I have to get on the stick and restock my disaster pantry.