Hi All. Maybe, just maybe the reason most people aren’t preparing for the next quake is because they are not a part of the process. Most people do not make plans to fail. What they don’t realize is that by not planning to survive the next major quake they are planning to fail.

Here in the United States there is a tendency on the part of the people to think that the Government is going to take care of them. Eventually the Government will, but what they fail to understand is that it will take that Government a considerable amount of time before they can react.

Throughout the 1990s and 1980s, numerous researchers emphasized that disaster planning must be conceptualized as a process (Drabek 1986). Moreover, those who are going to implement the plan must be involved actively in the planning process. If they are not, the paper plan that exists in a file drawer will have minimal impact on response behavior. As Dynes, Quarantelli, and Kreps (1972) put it: "Disaster plans too often remain paper plans and are not rehearsed in whole or in part". The people themselves have to be brought into the rehearsal so they can gain a better understanding as to how the process is going to work.

These themes were emphasized by many, but were documented most carefully by Wenger and two associates--James and Faupel (1980). They reviewed seventy-one community disaster plans and conducted in-depth interviews with fifty planning officials. Three observations sum up the deficiencies they discovered.

There is a tendency on the part of officials to see disaster planning as a product, not a process. (Wenger et al. 1980) Too often, disaster planning is isolated from the day-to-day planning process. It is often assigned to organizations, or units within organizations, that are divorced from traditional, institutionalized sources of social power within the community. (Wenger et al. 1980) ...these plans include almost no expectations for public behavior during a disaster. Furthermore, when attention is given to public response, it is generally predicted on erroneous conceptions of public behavior. (Wenger et al. 1980)

I could be wrong, but that is the way I see it. Take Care…Don in creepy town