“How many minutes do you think you have to boil water for it to be safe for consumption?”
Quizzing through a microphone, dressed in fatigues, New York Army National Guard First Lieutenant Kyle Kilner took answers from the audience of more than 100 crowding the benches in the council chambers of Kingston’s city hall on May 9.
“Ten? Twenty? Three? Okay. So, thank you for whoever guessed 20. It’s only two, so you’re wrong.”
The members of the crowd sat attentively testing their assumptions against the latest professional information on how best to survive everything that misfortune can think up.
Natural disasters like last summer’s massive flooding caused landslides and washed out roads. Technological disasters like the cyber attack at HealthAlliance Hospital in Kingston forced ambulances to be diverted out of county for days. Biohazard disasters like swine flu, mad cow disease and Covid seem less uncommon. Chemical disasters from train derailments. Systems failures, terrorist attacks, accidents on mass transit. Simple ambulance and fire calls, still the first line of defense for most emergencies. The list seems endless.
The state Homeland Security and Emergency Services office has prepared a 57-page emergency information handbook, to be handed out to anyone who wants it. The information, part of an effort to create a Citizens Preparedness Corps, contains information on how to build an emergency survival kit, how to plan one’s response ahead of time, how to survive in the moments during the situation, and how in the wake of the disaster to hunker down and re-emerge once the emergency has receded. A trifold in the pamphlet contained the motto of the corps: Prepare. Respond. Recover.
Don’t play fair
“In 2023, there were around 300 casualties nationwide, from active-assailant, active-shooter situations,” Kilner told the crowd, defining an active-shooter situation as one in which someone is trying to kill as many people as quickly as possible in a confined space, often with a firearm, vehicle, or knife. The protocol in this kind of situation, he counseled, was first to run, and failing that, to identify where the exits are and hide.
“You can close the door, barricade the door, lock the door, turn the lights off, silence your voices as well, silence your phones so that it doesn’t seem like anyone’s in the room.”
If neither running nor hiding works out, then turn and fight, attacking in numbers if possible.
“So use a multi-tool, use a chair, use a fire extinguisher,” Kilner counseled. “They’re not playing fair by doing something like this. You don’t have to, either …. And if you’re ever in a restaurant or a place with a kitchen — all kitchens have back exits, right, so that’s a quick entryway or exit path, and they also have pots, pans, and knives. So if you have to resort to fighting you’ve got a lot of weapons there.”
For those especially concerned with this type of emergency, Kilner recommends a video produced by the state, able to be watched by typing “480 seconds” into a YouTube search bar. “480 seconds” refers to the average time one should endeavor to stay alive once an imaginary countdown clock that starts ticking. Beyond that time, the chance of survival increases.
This is on Page 28 of the emergency information handbook.
Be prepared to survive
Other pages list other unique threats and best-outcome solutions. Recognizing the eight signs of terrorism is on Page 25, how to survive while in a broken-down vehicle stranded in the snow is on Page 57, plans to survive a lightning strike on Page 51.
Kilner suggests everyone should be prepared to survive on their own for seven to ten days.
“Sounds like a lot, right? But it’s important. Do you guys remember the Buffalo storms in December 2022? They had a no-drive order for seven days, which means they were not allowed to drive for seven days. Now, if you guys went home today and we got a no-drive order for seven days, how many of you think that you could survive for seven days with what you have in your home?”
At the end of the presentation, go-bags and a certificate of course completion were provided to the world-wiser audience.
“This is just a preliminary bag to get you started,” cautioned Kilner. “For home you’ll need a larger kit, and then this smaller kit for on-the-go in case you have to rapidly evacuate.”
It’s about self-sufficiency
Attendee Kielawan Ahmed, program director for Family House, believes the information shared was essential. She works for the teen shelter through Family of Woodstock, “and it’s really important that we’re prepared in case of an emergency.”
Unable to pin down the worst-case scenario out of the possible emergencies discussed, Ahmed admitted she worried about them all.
“I’m dealing with youth in crisis, just making sure that everyone is safe,” Ahmed said, “and making sure that they know what to do as well as my staff.
Dressed like a young professional, walking down the stairwell Tyler Ury said that he had attended to learn to be more adequately prepared in case of a disaster. “I was, I think, somewhat adequately prepared before,” he said, “but I do think that the education provided by this program has allowed me to be better prepared.”
As with Ahmed, there wasn’t one particular disaster upon which he was fixated on.
“Just a general preparedness,” he said. Though Ury wouldn’t consider himself a prepper, he conceded that preppers seemed the most prepared.
A general worry was not the case with Michael Rappapone, a professional welder.
“A terrorist attack scares the hell out of me,” Rappapone said. “It could be chemical, biological, you know, explosive. All those things together. But I didn’t hear anything new here.”
Rappapone felt the information shared had been “too polite,” and that self-sufficiency was what the presentation was really all about. “If you’re waiting for anyone else to come save you, it’s too late …. But I got a bag out of it.”
September will be emergency preparedness month. To find out where to get your own emergency information handbook and go bag, check out the website for the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.
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