The definitive guide to getting ready for and staying safe after a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. FEMA recommends being prepared for two weeks of self-sufficiency after it occurs, and this handbook will show you how with clear, informative, and easy-to-implement steps. Recent seismic activity has made national headlines and underscored the fact that the Cascadia fault line off the coast of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California is overdue for a major earthquake. And when it happens, living conditions could be akin to those in the mid-nineteenth century. This handbook covers the supplies you need to stay safely in place, including water, food (and food prep), first aid, sanitation, health and hygiene needs, shelter and bedding, and light/fire. It also includes lists of what to purchase and how to store it, as well as simple excercises to gain confidence in perfoming necessary tasks. Learn what to do during and immediately after an earthquake, how to develop a reunification plan, and how to communicate when basic infrastructure is down. It also addresses the particular concerns of those living in coastal areas (the tsunami zone) as well as those outside of the severe impact zone. It covers long-term ways to stay safe without modern conveniences and a crash course in survival techniques should the quake happen before all preparations are complete. Get Ready! presents information in clear, practical, and managable steps, equipping the reader with the skills to care for themselves and their loved ones should a major earthquake hit. And when it does, the internet will not be an option, making this reference handbook invaluable. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you need Get Ready! Deb Moller is the former public-private partnerships manager at the Oregon Department of Emergency Management. She is a Senior Fellow at the Center of Excellence for Homeland Security and Emergency Management, under the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges. She is a member of the Oregon Emergency Management Association and the Capital Area Emergency Management Committee. Deb is the founder of Cascadia Calling, an organization dedicated to earthquake preparedness in the region. She holds a master’s degree in applied behavioral science from Bastyr University. My 1949 Cape Cod–style house, with its dark shutters and trimmed shrubs, blends in well: a small house on a quiet street in the slow-paced capital city of Salem, Oregon. Unless, of course, you go snooping under the sofa, where cans of water—carefully placed on their sides in foil trays—hide. My hallways look ordinary, but open the linen closet and only one shelf holds sheets. The other three stock canned goods: hearty soups, baked beans, tuna, beef stew. Pull out the drawers below to reveal, six bottles of hand sanitizer, batteries of all sizes, two first-aid manuals for backcountry hikers, extralarge bottles of various pain pills, and packages of heavy-duty contractor garbage bags for lining buckets improvised into toilets. Elsewhere in the house, shelves, cupboards, boxes, and bins are filled with freeze-dried food, first-aid supplies, charcoal briquets, and a camp stove. What you’ve found are not the dark secrets of a paranoid doomsday fearer or the stockpile of an agoraphobic homebody, but the preparations of an expert who wants to be ready for the very real threat of a 9.0 Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. The Cascadia earthquake is the “Really Big One,” the earthquake that locals have whispered about, the one that the New Yorker freaked out the whole region about, the one that inspired this book. If the full 620-mile-long fault unlocks, we’ll see what scientists call a “full-rip” event (see page 4 for what this means), causing severe shaking from west of I-5 to the coast and farther east in some areas. When the shaking starts, we’ll be living in the twenty-first century; when it stops, we’ll be living in the 1850s: no power, water, plumbing, phones, or internet. Few basic public services and limited medical assistance. But our ancestors survived back then, and we can too—if we’re prepared. Emergency officials estimate that getting help to everyone will take two weeks or more. That’s why I am “two-weeksready”— I’m able to meet the needs of my family for fourteen days without outside help. That’s why you should be too. Preparation is hard to weave into modern life. Like so many before me, I failed time and again to put aside the hours to make the perfect emergency kit, to remember to rotate my food on the perfect schedule, and to make new plans every time anyone in the family changed jobs or schools. I could tell you that getting ready for a catastrophic earthquake is easy, a “just do it” proposition. I could tell you that the tips and tricks I’ve included here will help you avoid every obstacle along the way. I’d love to say I have a magic wand that can get you ready to survive for two weeks in a snap. It