Extreme Civil Emergency Flyers

The time to build the cellar is before the tornado hits

Original text by Bob Waldrop, Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House, Oklahoma City. Redaction by Arno Peters.

Note: the Extreme Civil Emergency flyer is customized for central Oklahoma. Use common sense to apply the information given to your own location and situation.

Printable Flyers Supporting Home and Community Scale Disaster Preparations

The various disasters of the last few years have taught critical lessons:

  • When the going gets rough, your local, state, and federal government may leave you behind for the wolves to devour.
  • A very large disaster — and/or several disasters coming on at the same time — will stretch the ability of the government and private aid agencies to respond adequately.
  • Government disaster response agencies are plagued with politics. Their decisions are not always made in accordance with the best practices of disaster response. Politics can delay or reduce to the point of inadequacy government responses to disaster. Your mileage may vary with this issue, depending on local conditions and the disaster.
  • Even with the best of intentions, the government can’t do everything, be everywhere, or rescue everybody. During disasters, people may be left to their own resources for an extended period of time. The cavalry may not always come riding over the hill to the rescue.
  • Besides weather-related disasters, we are at risk of terrorism, military attacks, financial crises, resource exhaustion, & collapse of irrational economic structures. Some disasters, such as an “Electromagnetic Pulse” attack, could affect all of North America. An EMP would destroy all electrical generating and distribution systems on the continent. It could take years for them to be replaced.
  • We are dependent upon a long and fragile supply line for gasoline and diesel. There are a hundred things that could happen as early as tomorrow that could break that supply chain. If the fuel stops, then so do the trucks that haul groceries. Most major supermarkets only have 3 or 4 days of food in their inventories; if the trucks stop, their shelves will be quickly stripped by panic buying.

The purpose of these “Printable Flyers” is to give general, basic information on coping with a fast-acting, long-lasting disaster where rescue will be delayed. Make copies of these flyers now, so you will have them ready if they were needed. Everyone hopes that something like this would never be needed — but if it is needed, the copy shops won’t be open. So make lots of copies now, when they are cheap and access is plentiful. When your neighbors need the info, you’ll have it for them. That could make a big difference in your neighborhood.

The time to copy your printable flyers is before the grid goes down and the copy shops close.

Use these flyers in support of grassroots mutual aid support work during disaster response — especially if the disaster is so big government response is delayed or entirely absent.

Print and copy them before a disaster so you have them available when they are needed and the copy shops are closed. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, to meet the challenges of political criminality, economic irrationality, resource exhaustion, and climate instability. You may make all the copies you want for free distribution.

These flyers may be downloaded and reproduced in any quantity for free distribution.

Besides the flyers linked above, the following links should also be printed, copied, and added to your response materials.

  • Everything Nice Stove Instructions! This is a pyrolizing stove that produces a hot flame with little smoke, and the end product is biochar, which can be used as fertilizer.
  • Building a small slow sand water filter for individual use. Complete plans, with pictures, for building this low tech water purification/filtration device. Water purification in a disaster is a big deal, and once constructed, this works by the simple flow of water through its system.
  • Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps. Identifies the fundamental threat in a disaster situation as the "six ways to die" — heat, cold, illness, injury, hunger, thirst. Illustrates the infrastructure that prevents deaths from these fundamental threats from killing us at these levels of complexity — personal, family/household, village, town, region, country, world.
  • Hexayurt — this is a simple emergency shelter that can be built with common materials by amateurs.
  • Oklahoma City Mutual Aid — notes developed at a workshop in Oklahoma on the theme — "What do we do here if civilization crashes?"
  • The Gupta State Failure Management Archive — this is a very large archive of material compiled by Vinay Gupta regarding options and management in the event of "state failure" — the collapse of existing systems.

What are Printable Flyers and why are they necessary and useful?

The world is afflicted with unjust and irrational economic and political structures. We face multiple threats including political criminality, resource exhaustion, climate instability, and economic irrationality, a perfect storm that can lead to collapse.

An unsustainable system will not go on forever. Unless the stress is relieved and the system made sustainable, it will eventually collapse. We hope that a "soft landing" can be engineered for our currently unsustainable systems of economics and politics and lifestyle, but just in case we are wrong. . . or you get stuck in a disaster when help is delayed. . . or there's some sudden need to jump start a sustainable society real quickly. . . here is a selection of "printable flyers" we hope would be useful in such a situation.

Emergency service organizations have great contingency plans for most "ordinary" disasters (weather events, other localized disasters, etc.), but we should all be concerned about the response of governments to what would be a continent-wide disaster/collapse.

I asked around here in Oklahoma City and local government has no contingency plans for protecting the families of emergency responders in such a situation, so that the police and fire departments can go about their duties confident that their families are OK. How long will they stay on the job if their families are at risk?

Government emergency plans are based on bringing resources from other areas to help the area in trouble. They don't ask and thus they don't answer the question — what happens if no help is available from outside the disaster area, because the disaster is continent-wide?

As far as I know, these printable flyers are the only community response materials for such a situation available on the internet.

The time to make contingency plans is before the situation collapses, and the most basic thing you can do is to download these flyers and copy them in advance of problems so that they are available when they are needed.

And absent a collapse or destablized situation, they have ideas about sustainable living and the importance of knowing and working with your neighbors which are useful for families and neighborhoods.

How to use these printable flyers.

My theory on crisis leadership is that "they who get there the firstest with the mostest" have the best chance of carrying the day.

Imagine the situation, a few days after everything pretty much slides into perdition. Maybe its been coming over a period of months, maybe its quick, like an EMP attack. Your neighbors get together to decide on what to do. You show up with copies of the printable flyers. Immediately, the flyers are the focus of discussion. Instructions! You brought instructions! Written instructions! We are all conditioned to follow the instructions, and here you are, with some instructions for a situation most of them have never ever thought about or considered possible. You gain cred because you contribute something useful.

Your neighborhood is not out of the woods yet, but now you have a plan, concrete actions to work on, something to do. Useful work that addresses the immediate needs of a complex disaster situation is the best way to process the feelings of panic and powerlessness that most people would be experiencing in such an unprecedented situation.

Besides your neighbors, think about your local government. After you meet with your neighbors, send a delegation downtown to city hall, and generally make enough of a polite nuisance of yourself to get yourself and your copies of the printable flyers in front of someone with some authority. Here again, you've brought instructions! Better than anything that FEMA has, ideas that even your local emergency services director hasn't thought of. Practical instructions that fit the circumstances, that weren't dictated by bureaucrats from far away.

To give yourself authority, give yourself authority. As you print and copy the printable flyers, start an informal organization. Call it "(Whatever the name of your town or area is) Mutual Aid". My group is Oklahoma City Mutual Aid. We've had a workshop to discuss our options in the event of a collapse situation here in central Oklahoma. See the details at Plan C for OKC. If someone asks, "What is that organization?", here's your answer — "We are an informal group of people concerned about community resilience in the face of major and grave challenges." While the copy shops are up and running, make yourself a professional-looking laminated ID card with your picture, signature, a logo (find a graphic of two hands clasped, or two people shaking hands), and the name of your organization. Punch a hole in the top for a lanyard. Get a brightly colored vest to go over your shirt, stencil OKC Mutual Aid on the back (or whatever your mutual aid groups is) and voila, you look just like everyone else who has some authority. Looks make the man, as they say, or in this case, the disaster responder.

All the other emergency workers will be wearing something like that, and if your community is of any size at all, somewhere there will be a committee of these emergency workers meeting, and your goal should be to get invited to those meetings. Bring your printable flyers, and you will be there the firstest with the mostest.

The alternative could be a take-over by what James Howard Kunstler calls the "corn pone fascists" or even worse. Disasters always bring out the best and the worst in people, and if you wait around and do nothing, you are at risk of being at the mercy of the worst. Don't wait for the best to come out in others, YOU are the BEST already so get busy and save your neighborhood. It won't save itself and if it goes done, so do you and your household.

Step forward, teach, suggest, coordinate, be a good example.

But if you don't download, print, and make copies now, you won't have the instructions to use in your are when times get tough.

So don't delay, print today! Procrastination is the thief of time.