Simulation - Earthquake

Sophie's Mid-term for one of her online classes was for our family to put on a simulation. We were to pretend to have an earthquake and then spend the rest of the day with no power, water or gas.

I am not much of an actress but when I "started the simulation" by saying "Earthquake". The kids ran under the table. Ian who had been laying on the futon just rolled onto the floor. As a result her ended up having a broken arm because something "fell" onto him. 

 We had to doctor him up as well as we could using what we had available. Henry had a "head injury" and we had to help him stop some bleeding and bandage him up a bit. We reviewed a few other first aid things they may need to remember and then the kids wanted to do the house inspection. We went to find the gas turn off and such and only discussed what to do but didn't actually turn anything off.

 We dug out and looked through our suitcase of camping and emergency supplies. I hate to call it a 72 hour kit. It isn't really all that well planned and it gets raided on occation so it was good to pull it out and look through it.

 Even the cat was interested in what we were doing.

 Since it was afternoon when our earthquake occured. Sophie sent a text to her father to let him know we were all doing fine (except for the head injury and the now miraculously healed broken arm). This was the first time Sophie had sent a text so it was good practice. I hadn't ever texted either until we moved here a few months ago. But in an emergency it would be the most likely way to talk to someone else.

 So after all the initial excitement the bordom set in. With no screens to look at the kids felt rather bereft. The played a few of the board games we have.

 Read some books.

 I had to take Molly for a walk because she couldn't say cooped up in the house. I guess you could say we were inspecting the neighborhood for damage.

 When we came back Sophie had her sewing box out and was working on another project she is supposed to be working on for school. She is making felt flowers to go along with a Civil War unit they are currently finishing up.

 The kids wanted something fun to do so I decided we could take our little sterno stove outside and boil some water. We took it to the far side of the backyard away from the house just in case there was "a gas leak". In our emergency supplies we have a few backpacker's dehydrated meals and I thought we should give one a try.

 Sterno takes a long time!

 Sophie, Molly and Ian had to go take a break from watching the pot and played some on the trampoline.

 Henry just waited and waited. He is a fire guy and didn't want to miss anything. They fun really got going when I made a quick trip inside and found some marshmellows and forks. We only had mini marshmellows so we had to put a few on a fork at a time and then held them to the heat.

Look at these grins and giggles. Aren't we supposed to be having a  disaster?! I guess you can have fun even while suffering from lack of screens.  Funny how marshmellows will bring out the smiles.

 Once the pot was out of the way. It had finally boiled and we added it to the camping food packets. Now it needed to sit for 10 min. So that gave the kids ample time to toast more marshmellows.

 These tasted really yummy. I didn't have any gram crackers or else I would have brought out the chocolate chips for smores. We stuck to just the marshmellows.

 The camping food ended up being too gross to eat. I guess I should have checked the expiration date. It was 4 years past it's date. We settled for mandarin oranges and granola bars for dinner. We did try the dehydrated ice cream too. It wasn't too bad. It was only 1 year past it's expiration.

After our oh so boring dinner we needed to clean up so the boys talked their dad into getting out the camping stove and boil a pot of water that way. It was much faster and they washed the few pots silverware that we had used.

When the sun went down and we had to get out the flashlights and lanterns.

 We had a few good rounds of Uno around the cozy light of the lantern.

 When there is only a few light areas in the house the family tends to all stay together.

And then went and got ready for bed. We were happy it was only a simulation and that we could wake up the next morning and have our power and water back.

We are certainly going to be revisiting our emergency supplies. We need to keep rotating the food in the kit. It is a good thing we still had access to the pantry and cabinets or we would have gone to bed hungry. We also need to have a good first aid lesson. When the injuries aren't real it was hard to see how they would acutally react but I know we could all use a good review of what we need to do for different types of injuries. With the drought in CA we have been adding lots of water to our storage so water was not something we worried about thankfully. We would have enough to last us for a number of days.

The simulation is something the kids want to do again. We decided we should do something like this evey year or so to help us review our food storage and 72 hour kits.

Our simulation only lasted about 9 hours. We could have gone longer but we have so many things in our schedule it was hard to even squeeze in the 9 hours.