Our training to deal with disasters has been largely irrelevant. : In Case of Quake, Bring Money and Wear the Right Shoes

The organizers of Earthquake Preparedness Week really blew it.

Had they wanted to jolt the citizenry into stockpiling provisions and taking other precautions, they should have arranged for a telecast of the 1974 movie “Earthquake.”

I don’t remember much about that movie except how rotten it was--rotten but scary rotten--and that the quake that provided its seat-rattling denouement had a sensibility remarkably like Jerry Falwell’s. This movie temblor wasn’t just an illustration of the downside of plate tectonics. It was a geological Avenging Angel that seemed to know who had been naughty and nice and selectively destroyed any character who had diddled earlier in the epic with the Seventh Commandment.

It made you think. Not much, but enough to know that one good way to minimize your chances of being in the inevitable Big One was to limit your time in California.

I saw the movie very far from the Southland indeed, in Buffalo, N.Y., and felt quite smug about my degree of earthquake preparedness. So smug that I temporarily forgot the importance of blizzard preparedness, which is why I spent a major part of Western New York’s infamous blizzard of ’77 shivering in a car unequipped with an emergency Hershey bar.

Unlike the non-alarmist literature of earthquake preparedness, “Earthquake” reminds you that, if the freeway can suddenly buckle under Charlton Heston, it can sure as hell buckle under you. The question is what are you going to do about it.

Cry a lot and try to remember all the words to the Act of Contrition, I’ll wager, and not much more.

The reason, I suspect, is that, although most of us have been trained to deal with disasters, our training has been largely irrelevant.

What do you do if an H-bomb falls on your neighborhood? We used to prepare for that all the time in third grade. We all know what to do.

You proceed from the classroom in an orderly fashion, right? And then you crouch down in the hallway and somehow protect your fragile, priceless brain by throwing your skinny little arms over it. Or you stay in the classroom (in an orderly fashion) and crawl under your desk.

While you are under there, you have a few quiet moments to think, a disastrous contingency in itself. I remember wondering during one air-raid drill if a class picture, taken at the moment the bomb hit Enfield Elementary School, would show our glowing skeletons arranged in rows, with the tall ones in the back.

Mostly, though, we worried that, bomb or no bomb, crouching under the desk would result in a real disaster.

In that weird position our underwear could be exposed, thereby forcing us to take our own young lives, or, at the very least, to persuade our parents to move out of state.

Survivor Industries Inc. of Agoura is in the emergency-preparedness business, provisioning and advising individuals, businesses and other institutions for the disaster they hope they will never face.

According to Vice President Geoffrey Stevens, the company debriefed survivors of real crises--people who had successfully negotiated a major earthquake or a nasty little war--in order to find out what you really need, and need to do, in a society-disrupting emergency.

Some of the basics are obvious--food, water, shelter and something to stop the bleeding until the doctor digs out of his condo. But Stevens and his colleagues have thought more about even these essentials than most of us.

For example, the food bars included in their prepackaged emergency kits were formulated to be relatively low in protein (easier on the kidneys) and virtually salt-free. This is especially important, given the likelihood that water will be scarce in an emergency.

The survival grub isn’t so tasty that consumers are going to request it later in restaurants, Stevens acknowledges, but it won’t spoil and it produces little waste. The latter makes good sense, given the possibility that plumbing as well as police services have broken down. (For waste disposal, the kits come with something akin to Hefty bags, only sturdier and less porous.)

People frequently forget that they’ll need sensible shoes to safely trod the broken glass that routinely accompanies disasters, Stevens says, and they often forget to stockpile an emergency supply of any drugs they must take regularly.

“I’ll tell you the best one,” he says, as he rattles off often overlooked essentials. “Money!”

How you deploy your supplies is a critical factor in surviving an emergency, Stevens points out. More and more businesses are preparing the workplace for a catastrophe, but not always with this in mind, he says. He cites the hypothetical example of an employer that ill-equips its 40-story office building with survival supplies by failing to put them in reach of employees.

“They go out and spend an arm and a leg on provisions and then put them all in the basement,” he says of such bunglers. “Provisions don’t do a darn bit of good if you can’t get to them.”

Which is why the Hershey bar goes, not in the trunk, but the glove compartment.