Are You Prepared? Let’s Do It Today!
A natural disaster or catastrophic event can take place at any time. Hopefully it won’t affect you, your family or friends. But in reality, it can happen to anyone of us in a second. Our lives can be turned upside down; leaving us displaced, confused and forced to restrict our regular daily living routines. What we are talking about are the unfortunate events sometimes caused by tornados, hurricanes, flooding, fires or other disasters that can leave us completely unsettled. We all hope and pray nothing like this will happen to us or our family or friends but, bad things do happen. Emergency Preparedness experts recommend that taking some simple precautions ahead of time, like making an emergency kit, can help us in times of crisis and even save lives. Being prepared during an emergency situation can help us cope better during extreme circumstances by mitigating some of the negative consequences associated with natural disasters or catastrophes.
In order to prepare you and your guide dog, the GDUI Disaster Assistance & Preparedness Program (DAPP) has compiled a Pet Preparedness Kit information package to assist GDUI members in preparing a survival kit for you and your guide dog. The online documents include an instruction sheet to help decided what is needed to go in your go bag and two sheets to be filled out with both your personal information as well as your dog’s, plus links at the end of this page directing you to the FEMA page and Ready.gov, both which are helpful for anyone needing preparedness information.
The information sheets can be completed by copying or printing and filling out the information to include in your personal kit and go bag.
Yes, we need to “Be Prepared”. That is of course, as prepared as one possibly can be before the unexpected happens. Making an emergency survival kit for you and your guide dog is the best thing you can do for both of you, let’s get ready, do it today. For a more detailed list of instructions for making your go kit, follow the links to the DAPP pages or click on the links below:
- My Health Information, Survival kit
- Service Dog Information, Survival kit
- Tips on making your own survival kit for you and your guide dog
The DAPP team recommends visiting www.ready.gov to review the various emergency preparedness brochures published by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Or you can call them for free brochures at: 1-800-237-3239.
You may want to also make a second set of your go kit information sheets and place them in your refrigerator in a water tight plastic bag with the word, “Emergency” written on it. Many first responders are trained to look inside a refrigerator to find this type of information if they find a person unresponsive in their home.
We hope you and your guide dog will never experience any type of a natural disaster, an emergency or any type of a catastrophic event, leaving you displaced from your home, without food, shelter or daily living needs. If you are a GDUI member, you may be eligible for a one-time disaster relief cash stipend. To find out more, please click on the following link: Disaster Assistance and Preparedness Program (DAPP)
Being prepared ahead of time makes sense for all of us, just in case.
All documents are open source materials and posted here as a courtesy of the GDUI Disaster Assistance & Preparedness Program (DAPP) Team. Rev. 2/2015.