Be Prepared: are you ready for an emergency?

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - On May 3rd, Sarah Rosen from the Strathcona Regional District came to the Pioneer Room at Mansons Hall to talk about emergency preparedness… and there were about eight people in the room. As Sarah herself said, the biggest emergency preparedness risk on the island might just be that so few of us are thinking about it. [I’ll admit that I’ve been procrastinating — not getting around to producing this story — and it might be because the subject is a little uncomfortable when you know that you yourself are not prepared. But avoidance and procrastination are exactly the problems that Sarah came to address, and she says being prepared might not be as daunting as you think.] Sarah Rosen speaks at the Pioneer Room, May 3rd 2026 — photo by Roy Hales With just three questions: should I stay, should I go, how do I know? I’m gonna walk you through how you could prepare for everything. Three Essential Questions In the first week of my job, I was given an amazing insight by one of my former coworkers, the basis of these three questions: Should I stay? Should I go? How do I know? And what I learned from her is that basically there’s only two types of disaster and emergency in terms of how you actually wanna prepare for them: situations where you need to stay put or shelter in place, and then situations where you need to evacuate (and typically you need to evacuate fast). Sarah works for the Emergency Services section of the Strathcona Regional District. She travels to communities across the region to offer these workshops, and her job is to make emergency preparedness feel manageable rather than overwhelming. So she structures everything around those three core questions. My sense is that some people feel so overwhelmed by the scope of all the disasters that can happen that they choose consciously or subconsciously to just not even kind of open their minds up to the preparedness process, and I really understand that. Like if, if you have this sense of like, you know, a wall of fire bearing down on your home or a catastrophic earthquake, and that’s what’s in your mind when you’re thinking of preparedness, it’s pretty easy to feel powerless in the face of that.