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Preparedness for College Students, by An Oregonian
I was raised in a family with a survivalist mentality. We were the family prepared for Y2K. I learned to shoot at age six. We lived on a farm and had the knowledge and ability to grow all our own food. I was taught self-reliance and how to think as a “prepper”. Basically, my parents did the best they could to impress on me that the stability and safety we experience in the United States is precious and very possibly temporary. But even with all this training, my first year living away from my family I was caught unprepared.
In 2008 I left Oregon to attend college in Southern California. Two months later, I was A College Student’s Guide to Prepping, by Connie E. placed into one of the very situations I had been prepared for all my life: a natural disaster. In mid-November a wildfire started less than a mile from my campus that is nestled in the foothills of Santa Barbara. The fire started a few minutes after 5pm in the evening. Less than twenty minutes later the fire alarms went off. I was recovering from a knee injury at the time and was on crutches. As I limped out of my dorm, I was frustrated that someone had, once again, burned popcorn or some such item causing the alarms to sound. Because it didn’t even enter my head that there might be a real threat, I grabbed only my cell phone and keys. As I slowly hobbled down the stairs and turned to look behind the dorm, I saw the flames. Already twenty feet high, they looked as if they were right behind my dorm. All of a sudden, I realized that I had practically nothing with me. Dressed in the clothes I had worn to my chemistry lab that afternoon, I had no ID, no money, none of my prescription medications, no plan beyond following the directions of the college to go to the gym in the event of wildfire, and no time to go back to my room for anything else.
When I arrived in the gym there was mass panic. Students were frightened, annoyed, and hungry. Many had been about to eat dinner after a long day of classes, when the fire alarms sounded. Quickly, the school accounted for all the students, and tried to calm us down. Over the next hours, the gym filled with smoke so thick that we all had to lay down on the floor to breathe. Members of the Santa Barbara community were sheltering in place with us. A six week old infant was among those that sat in the smoke filled gym. The fire department decided it would be too dangerous to move the 800+ people out of the gym and decided to have us shelter in place. Surprisingly, after the initial panic everyone was calm. Groups of students formed prayer circles, or talked quietly. When I got up to use the bathroom, I could see ten foot flames just outside the gym windows.
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