Shannon 0:15
Today's episode is brought to you by the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources and the Seeds of Wellbeing or SOW project. This podcast is supported by the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network grant from the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Hawaii Department of Agriculture.
Mele 0:35
Aloha welcome everyone to the SOW podcast aimed to provide educational support information, guidance and outreach to our farmers, ranchers and our allied agriculture producers in Hawaii. We are your host, Millie Oshiro and
Shannon 0:49
Shannon Sand.
Mele 0:51
And today we're gonna be talking to Nancy Oʻokie about disaster preparedness. Yes. Thank you for joining us, Nancy, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk story with us. Yeah. Yeah, great to have you on the show. Maybe you want to just kind of start by just sharing a little bit with everybody about your current position and a little bit of your background?
Nancy 1:14
Sure. Bear with me, it's a little bit of a meandering story, but I'll try to keep it as short as I can. I actually did not come here for a job at the University of Hawaii. I was already here. So I've, I've been in Hawaii since 1985, actually. And I've had various jobs that have taught computers in elementary school. And I've taught computer science at the community college, I have worked in other various aspects of businesses on the islands. And I actually worked for the University of Hawaii in a different capacity at something called University Center, which I'll give them a little plug here, because it's kind of unknown. There's only three of them in the entire state. There's one on Maui, one on Kawai, and one on the Big Island. And their job is to give access to people in areas that don't have access to a four year university to be able to get bachelor's and master's degrees in distance learning. I work with them on Maui campus for about five years. And I saw an opening for my current position, which is with the University of Manoa that is on Maui Island. And it is a 4-H and Youth Development Agent. So I cover Maui, Molokai and Lanai, and I do youth programming for kids aged five to 19. And so that is my main job. I took that on in 2015. In 2019, the university overseeing the 4-H program and other extension programs such as the Ag agents and forestry is what we call the extension director and 2019, that person retired. And the person that was our Hawaii state 4-H program leader moved into that position temporarily. And so that left the puka or a hole for our Hawaii State 4-H program leader and I said that I would take it on temporarily, just to make sure nothing fell through the cracks while we look for any person to be the state 4-H program leader in 2019. And 2019.
Shannon 3:26
Yes, so you've been doing two jobs for two years.
Nancy 3:32
And it has been challenging with COVID. It's taken a lot of my time. But it's been it's been good too. There's some pluses to it, I get to see what everyone is doing on the other islands. And I get to see kind of an overview picture, which is you don't always get sometimes when you're doing agent work in your county, You might collaborate with other people. So
Shannon 3:51
I would almost imagine it would be someone advantageous because you know what other people are doing on the other islands and where you can, I don't want to say cross pollinate. I guess I'm gonna say cross pollinate.
Nancy 4:05
Yeah, so that's been that has been very advantageous. And the best part is because of my position, I get to interact with other state 4-H program leaders in the rest which gives us a lot of ideas, and we all, you know, share our issues and get solutions. And so it's actually had some really good benefits. So it's been a good thing. So currently, yes, I'm doing the dual hat thing, but I'm the how I fell into disaster preparedness is through another hat that I wear. So nationally, so extension programs are national, I'm assuming the audience knows what extension is, but just really quickly, it's a third arm of land grant universities that brings research based programs out into the community. And so every state has at least one college that is the land grant college. So nationally, there is a collaborative effort called the Extension Disaster Education Network, or EDEN. And what it is, is extension agents, any kind, so they could be 4-H, it could be agriculture, they could be master gardeners they could be any type of extension person, but part of their programming is disaster education. And so we all get together once a year at a conference and share ideas and help each other out. It's a very strong network, we coordinate in emails, unfortunately, the Midwest tends to have the enormous amount of flooding. So every year when the flooding happens, we'll put out a call for help. And people will help or share ideas, we've all helped each other with the COVID pandemic. And so it's a great, great network. And my role in that for Hawaii is I'm technically the Hawaii State point of contact. So I am the one that is the representative for Hawaii to that organization. And so through that organization, I became really interested in disaster preparedness. And, and that also came through my role as the Valley County 4-H agent. So the way we deliver 4-H is through three ways. One is a club setting. So those are traditional clubs that probably everyone's familiar with, where there's a leader, and they have five to 10 kids, and they, they're in it basically, from kindergarten till they graduate high school, and every year we'll do a different project. Yeah, it's, it's still very popular, very strong. But actually is the traditional model in that that's kind of what a lot of the research is based on, is having that environment, that consistency is what develops all those leadership and communication skills and things. But they're now finding new ways to deliver that in shorter periods of time, because not everyone wants to do a 13 year program. So we're finding shorter ways to what we call spin clubs, with your special interest clubs, and so those are just centered around a project. So it might be photography, it might be cooking, or something, it might be six weeks, it might be six months, but it kind of still has that same opportunities for them to learn leadership and communication and things. So that's one model of how we deliver programming. But another one is through grant funded program. So as agents, we do write grants and receive national grants. And these have specific goals of mine, obviously, it could be that you have to work with a particular population, like an at risk population, and maybe that it's focused on literacy, or whatever it is that the grantʻs focused on. So there was one that I heard about Mississippi State University, so they're the ones that got the grants, that they were looking for partners to do what we call sub awards, or part of the grant under them to deliver disaster preparedness training, to high schoolers. And so it sounded really interesting to me, I connected with Dr. Ryan Akers, who's at Mississippi State University. And Hawaii became one of the pilot sites and we're one of the original eight pilot sites. What it is basically is built on the CERT program, which is the Community Emergency Response Team, which is run out of state and county emergency management agencies. There's a lot of acronyms and a lot of agencies in this, so bear with me. But it basically trains citizens, or community members to help out in a disaster. And it came out of an earthquake in Mexico in 1975. But it might be wrong on the year, but 1970s, where it was a huge earthquake. And a lot of people from America and other countries rushed down there to help had no clue what they were doing. And people got injured people died. So they decided, Hey, we should probably train people. So that if they're helping out, they know what they're doing. And so their role basically is if there's a big enough disaster, the first responders, they're going to take care of the big stuff, right? The fire department is going to take out putting out fires at the hospital or the police are going to take care of a riot. But there's other things that are happening if there's a big enough disaster in your neighborhood and in your community. And so the CERT members are trained to, you know, start at home, start in the community and help out because a disaster happens where it happens. So you may be right there when it happens. Or you may be at a place where no one can get to you because of where it happened. And so it's a fantastic program. I recommend people to check it out. Anyone can participate in it, but it is for adults. So this program under Mississippi State University, which is called my PI, and our version is my PI Hawaii teaches the same exact curriculum, the exact same programming to high school students. And then depending on your county or your states, the teens may or may not respond to an emergency most of the time, they will, but there'll be sort of backlines, they might provide water to the volunteers things like that, just for safety purposes, but they still are trained in everything that the adults learn. So they learn fire safety, how to use a fire extinguisher, when to how to put out a fire safely, they learn first aid, they learn triage, which is really an important skill, but can also get kind of difficult for teens, because you actually have to make life and death decisions with it. So we find it's a really good learning experience for the youth to really think deeply gives them a lot of empathy. When they learn about triage, they learn light search and rescue. So they can go out and assess the damage to buildings without going in, if it's heavily damaged, they can look for people and then do triage. And there's also a whole part on disaster psychology, we try to teach them that, you know, obviously, people that go through a disaster are impacted, but you as a search and rescue person as a volunteer are also going to be impacted and that it's important that you take care of yourself as well. And it sadly, this is even more important with the pandemic, because pandemics aren't over quickly. It goes on and on and on and on. So weʻre seeing that as a really important factor. And then we just kind of cover a variety of disasters that they could encounter, we have to teach them everything. So because it is a certificate program, they do have to learn anything. So kids in Hawaii have to learn about avalanches, even though the likelihood is pretty pretty, pretty, pretty small.
Shannon 11:34
You never know, maybe they're going snowboarding somewhere, so
Nancy 11:37
the Big Island does get snow, so. Exactly, exactly. So it's it's been a really good program. Yeah. Ironically, the pandemic disaster has sidelined our disaster programming, but hopefully we will get back to it soon. Because it really doesn't require an in person delivery, because they have to practice first aid and triage and all of that. So hopefully, by the fall, fingers crossed, we can start doing it again. Because it was it was starting to become pretty popular. And so from that program, I became a certified instructor there, which means I now have a basic understanding of disaster prep, I would not call myself an expert. I'm nowhere near what a first responder is. But I understand the basic concept of what the disaster prep is, I know the different parts of disaster preparedness. And I've taught it's six times now sometimes. So it's, I'm familiar with it. And the one thing that's that's really important to me, and that I think people don't really understand or think about enough is that disaster preparedness actually is goes beyond disaster preparedness. Preparedness is only one part of what they call the emergency management cycle. There's actually four parts to it. So there's preparedness. And I'll kind of if we have time a little bit, I'll kind of go through the four parts. But there's preparedness, which is the one I think most people are familiar with. There's a response, which is when a disaster happens, and what happens after a disaster, there's recovery. And then there's mitigation, and all 4 parts are important. But I would say a lot of people don't put enough effort into mitigation, and it's probably one that will give you the biggest payoff if you do it correctly, and take the time to work on it. And it's really important for everybody, but it's also equally important for farmers and ranchers and ag producers too. Yeah.
Mele 13:41
Yeah, that's, you know, I guess I kind of always realized that there was a little bit more to, you know, preparing for disaster, but not realizing, you know, understanding that I knew that there's all these different parts, right, where respond, you have to then figure out how you can recover from things and whatnot. But I didn't even think of it as being all in that. That cycle. You know, we just kind of think, Oh, how do you prepare for a disaster, but there's so much I think more?
Shannon 14:07
Yeah, like, that's a lot. I was like, it sounds like it's something we all I mean, it is something we all know, about us preparing, but we don't really think enough about and I was like to know that there are like these four cycles, I guess. Is that the correct terminology?
Nancy 14:25
four parts to the cycle.
Shannon 14:26
Anyway, so I was like, this is kind of amazing. So is there like, additional information or processes to just help people like better prepare and know kind of like what they should do in an emergency or, like,
Mele 14:39
understand that cycle? Maybe? Yeah,
Nancy 14:41
yeah. And, yeah, you're right. I mean, we don't think about it enough. You know, hurricane season will start on June 1, and we'll be like, I gotta check my emergency kit and then forget about it. Right. So yeah, the more you can remind yourself to think about it. One thing I would say is I recommend people write on their calendar monthly. or every six months or something, certain things to do. So the one thing they say is on the equinox on Spring equinox and fall equinox, right? Check the batteries in your smoke detectors. Maybe every two months, you want to check the expiration date on the food in your emergency kit. So that's one way that'll kind of help you for preparedness to make sure you always have everything ready and that you're prepared. But the other part I think, is just kind of breaking down the parts of the cycle and becoming a little more familiar with them. And then making notes to your own situation and what what it is that you can do to help yourself. And so I'll just kind of go through the different parts of preparedness again, I'll start with that. It's not necessarily the first part, but it's the one we all know. So this is the one when we hear on the TV that there's a hurricane warning, right? And we all run to Costco and we fill up our carts.
Shannon 15:53
Clear out the shelves of everything we can.
Nancy 15:56
Exactly do all the stuff that we probably should have had been doing for months and months, but we didn't do. And again, this is going to vary too, depending on what the disaster is that's coming, some of them a hurricane. I'm not saying hurricanes are good. They're not good, but they're good in the sense for preparedness, you have a while right? Yeah, you know that they're coming and you warning, but other ones you don't necessarily know an earthquake, you don't know is gonna come right, tornado, I know, we don't really necessarily get those. But from what I see on the mainland, sometimes they don't have a lot of warning, a little warning, but not a lot of warning. And so it's better to be prepared because you don't know I think I think in Hawaii, sometimes we get complacent because our main one is hurricanes and flooding. And usually we have warning. So don't necessarily take it for granted, though, that's that's one key thing is just make sure that you're prepared and keep yourself updated. And so preparedness can just be general things like getting your food, your water, your batteries, updating your contact list. I know when the earthquakes happened in Florida and Puerto Rico a couple years ago, Facebook added that out of state contact. So if you are on Facebook, you could pick someone that's out of your state to sort of be the communicator in case your family is cut off, and other people can can work with that person. So you want to make sure you have a couple of ways to communicate. When I teach this with high schoolers, the one thing I always reiterate to them is that you may not have your cell phones, it's very devastating to them to know that they may lose cell phone access. And so I try to tell them that you know, you have to think of other ways that you can communicate if your cell phone's not working, or you have no internet for three weeks.
Shannon 17:34
Yeah, cuz the towers could be down like if it's a severe windstorm or, like if there's an like, whatever the issue is tsunami or something I was like earthquakes was like, yeah,
Nancy 17:46
Exactly, exactly. I mean, I know on my side of the island, it's a joke, but if somebody sneezes, we lose power sometimes. So you can lose power really quickly, usually in a disaster, you're gonna lose your power, you're gonna lose your internet. And if it's big enough, yeah, the towers can go down, they can literally fall down you know. So you want to make sure you have ways to communicate. And you want to make sure that people that you need to be in touch with immediately your immediate family knows the same plan so that if you can't call them on the cell phone, they know where to go what to do. And so when I get in a disaster is coming, the things you want to do is maybe you want to fill up your tanks in your vehicles, or equipment on a farm, you might want to make sure your your farm equipment has as fuel, because if the fuel gets wiped out for a couple weeks, you're not gonna be able to do anything. Anything that's loose, you want to make sure you can secure it or put it inside or something. So it doesn't become a projectile, shut off your water, your gas and electricity. If it's in a place that you don't need it. Check your chemicals, make sure they're secure earthquake or something with high wind could knock things over. You shouldn't be storing things that potentially could mix badly anyway. But that could be a thing. So you want to make sure everything is organized and secured. If you have equipment, flooding is a danger with a lot of different disasters. So you want to make sure it's on high ground. And then depending on what the disaster is, you might want to harvest so that you don't lose things. So as much as you can, it's kind of it's going to be kind of a personal calling. And you know, you'll be the experts, but that might be something to consider too. And the reason why we want you to kind of keep working on your preparedness is that if it's a last minute thing, supplies run out, or the roads might not be passible, and you can't go get those supplies after the fact. So it's much better to have it with you already. So that's the preparedness phase. And again, I think that's the one that most people are familiar with. Yeah,
Shannon 19:44
I feel like that's the one you hear about on the radio a lot. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I was like on the radio or the news or
Nancy 19:53
Even when people talk about this whole emergency they're really mostly call it disaster prep or disaster. preparedness really, really focuses on that part. But but the other parts are kind of important. So the response part, this is really not for home, people, this is for the professionals, they are the ones that are going to go out, assess the damage, they're going to rescue people provide first day, they're going to evaluate the systems, the electric, the water, the communication, that's not going to be us, we're not going to be climbing cellphone towers to see what's working or not. What we should be doing in response. And again, response is a disaster has struck. What we're going to be doing is just focusing on our own house, our businesses, taking care of what's around us, what's near us, one of the main things to do, and it's hard, it's easy to say, it's not always easy to do, but try to stay calm. Because you want to stay calm, and keep yourself safe. If something happens to you, you're not going to help anybody, you're not going to be of any use to anybody. And you may make it harder for other people to have to come rescue you. So the more you can stay calm, the more you can think clearly. The more you can keep yourself safe, the better. Take care of your family members, check on them, make sure they're okay. We even tell when we teach the CERT training, we say you know when there's a disaster before you even think about coming to help in your CERT role, make sure your family is safe. Because if you're out trying to help other people, but you're worried about your brother or your daughter, you're not gonna be this calm. So make sure everybody you know is safe and good first, that's the most important thing. And big picture wise, if there's 100 of us taking care of our households, or our neighborhood, that's 100 less areas that the emergency responders need to worry about, right, so it does help in the bigger picture as well. You want to go out and safely assess your property for damage if you can. Obviously, if the hurricane is still raging, don't go out. Obviously, if there's electrical lines down, don't go out. But if it's safe, you can go out and do a general assessment. Do not go into anything if it looks like you shouldn't go in it, don't go in it. If it looks damaged, wait for professionals to come and give you advice. Follow whatever the local emergency response teams are telling you. So watch the news watch listen to the radio, if they're saying stay off the road, stay off the roads. One important thing about staying off the roads is the emergency vehicles need to get through and we're on the road blocking them up, they can't do that. So you want to stay home and just focus on yourself. And response for yourself. Again, we're just focusing on response for your house, for your business is going to be 1000 times easier if you have already in place a response plan. So this is something you want to do ahead of time. Again, don't start writing your response plan the day after the hurricane hit because it's not going to be much help. You want to start writing tomorrow, so that if a hurricane came, you would know what to do. The other piece to it is that you're very clear on who is supposed to do what what of the communication tree would look like whoʻs supposed to call whom. What safety guidelines to follow.
Shannon 23:07
So communication tree, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Nancy. I was like, Can you kind of explain what that is. Because I mean, I only know that because I've lived through several disasters at this point in my life in a lot of different places. But I was like I was really only introduced to it when I was like at my previous job. So I was like I don't, I don't know that everybody knows what that is. So can you.
Nancy 23:29
So it's called a tree because if you can visualize, visualize a piece of paper. And at the top is a box with the bosses thing, for example. And then underneath, there's a line and then two branches off of that, maybe two other boxes of baby, the vice bosses and then under that are more branches with more boxes. And that is how the communication will happen. So the boss will call these two boxes, these two boxes will each call these four boxes, these four boxes, what is called these four boxes. And so it looks like a tree on a piece of paper, which is why it's called that. And it just makes it efficient. If the boss had to call 150 employees, it would take forever. It just makes it go much, much faster and smoother. And if it's on a piece of paper and writing and update it regularly, because the last thing you want to do is call someone and they haven't worked for the company for five years. That's not very helpful.
Shannon 24:22
So they don't know who to call. Yeah.
Nancy 24:24
Exactly. And so part of all of this planning is to constantly check it and update it where it needs to be updated. But the other piece to all of this is a response plan is fantastic, but if you're the only one that knows what it says it's not going to help anybody want to make sure everyone that needs to know what this response plan is, has a copy of it and knows how to use it. You could even have a dreaded meeting but you could have a mini meeting that kind of goes over it just so everybody's clear on what it does and how it works. And then again outside of your immediate home or business, leave the rest of the professionals, yes, CERT could go out there and help because they've been trained to but just stay out of their way and let them do what they do best. And that's the response. So the disaster came, and we immediately reacted to it. The longest part of the cycle is recovery. Oh, yeah. And it really depends on what the disaster is. But the recovery is, this is, this is the part where life goes back to quote unquote, normal. Sometimes it's a new normal, a lot of adjustments have had to be made. But things settle down a little bit. You know, schools are kind of back up and running. Hospitals are not overwhelmed. The electric grid, everybody seems to have power again, the economy is starting to work a little bit again. And it can take a very long time. And you can see with the pandemic, we're still not recovered.
Shannon 25:55
I was gonna say yeah, this actually sounds all very familiar at this point in time. Yeah. Like, I feel that one have for a couple years now.
Nancy 26:04
Yeah, and the longer the disaster, the longer the recovery. So, so it's gonna take a long time to recover from the pandemic, unfortunately. And it's not as simple as an earthquake. Because an earthquake, you see what buildings fell down, okay, those are the ones we have to fix. The pandemic is is very nuanced. And there's a lot of things happening. Mental health is a huge issue that now needs to be taken care of. The economy is a huge issue. So these are the large systems that have been broken, basically, from a disaster. And this is not something that any one person is going to fix, it's going to take a community, it's going to take the government, it's going to take funding, you know, it's going to take a lot of things. But your role as a community member is just to become involved. Find out what you can do to help find out what resources are available. See how you can help that community. The one thing I gotta say, in the pandemic, working for College of Tropical Ag and Human Resources, I do talk to a lot of ag agents and who talked to a lot of farmers and so many people stepped up at the beginning of the pandemic, there were people that didn't have food, there were people that were given to them. It was awesome to see how how people just kind of stepped out take care of each other. And that, well, it wasn't a recovery. It helps to kind of lessen what was happening from the disaster. So that was kindaʻ nice to see
Shannon 27:25
Definitely I was yes, I think the the ag industry in Hawaii responded in a very positive manner to really help people a lot. So yeah.
Nancy 27:37
And it also brought up a lot of discussions about our food system and our local food system.
Mele 27:42
Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yeah.
Shannon 27:44
I mean, I think these were things that like, the, the people were aware of were, like, I want to say tangentially like the general public. They're like, "Oh, yeah, we know, like, we only have seven days." But like, when a real long term disasters such as what were in his hit, then it's like, it becomes really apparent. And like, I will say, like, the support, I think in ag has, like really ramped up over I would say, like, the last, you know, I guess, almost two years now. Like,
Mele 28:16
Yeah, I think it really brought all of that to the forefront of everybody's mind. Yeah. And, you know, down to our legislators to kind of realize that you know, what this is, you know, it's time to start thinking about actions and not just, you know, doing them and not just talking about them, right. So,
Nancy 28:34
Yeah, I think sometimes people visually need to see it. And unfortunately, the pandemic allowed that. And so I really hope I am very optimistic that part of the recovery will be attention to the local food system and food insecurity. Iʻve just seen groups pop up here and there and start talking about it and I do see the legislature, members of the legislature getting involved in asking questions about it. So yeah, I do hope I do think that that will be part of our recovery for the pandemic, which could be a better thing, you know, so that's the, the third step is recovery. And again, that's usually the longest one could take years, unfortunately, for that to happen.
Shannon 29:16
Potentially decades, who knows. Yeah.
Nancy 29:18
Well, yeah. Honestly, for some things decades. We get. I was just talking to someone the other day poor Haiti, you know, they just want to get built back up after like, 5, 10 years to get another new hurricane
Shannon 29:30
Yeah, they have another issue. Yeah, another disaster.
Nancy 29:33
And it takes a long time. Yeah. So the third, the fourth part of the cycle, which I feel like for businesses, homeowners, too, but for businesses is very important, and it's the ones that I think your farmers would be and ranchers will be interested in and it will. If it's done correctly, it can save you money can save you time and most importantly save lives. And this is the mitigation cycle and And we don't talk about it as much. I don't hear about it in media very much. So when they talk about preparedness, there is some mitigation involved in preparedness. So if you dig a trench in your backyard, because there might be flooding, or you buy sandbags or something, that's mitigation, because mitigation is basically trying to lessen the impact wherever the disaster is gonna be. But because you're doing it in response to whatever disasters coming, it really is just sort of a stopgap temporary measure. And those sandbags gone after the flooding is done or whatever. But there's mitigating that you can do for long term planning that I think is more important. And so the first step, I would say, for mitigation is to really assess your location, what disasters are most likely to happen where you are. So is it flooding? Is it a hurricane? Is it a wildfire, and then put your attention into those, you don't need to prepare your farm for an avalanche, right, you want to spend all your time and money, probably flooding, flooding is the number one disaster around the world period. It's more than anything else. And so depending on where you are, you want to make sure you have things in place. A good person to talk to is an insurance agent, they'll tell you what is are good things to include, to keep your house and your business safer. You want to develop a farm emergency plan. So you want to make sure whatever plan you come up with you invest the time and the money and the resources so that it's actionable, and can be completed if a disaster happens. And then I mentioned this before, but make sure you're regularly reviewing it, and updating the plan. Because if it's out of date, it's almost as worthless as not even having one. It could be worse, actually, if you're talking about chemicals, and those chemicals are different now or so you want to make sure that you're really updating it, at least yearly. I would say June 1 is a good date to put on your calendars. June 1 is the beginning of hurricane season. So it's talked about in lots in Hawaii. So it should be a good reminder, we'll hear about it. That might be your your yearly anniversary for checking your emergency response plan. And again, emergency response plan might not be just for hurricanes. But that's okay. You want to make sure it's for whatever might happen wherever it is that you are. And as far as production considerations, you want to make sure that you're updating and have a really good inventory and accounting of what all your equipment is, what your machinery is, what your chemicals are, and where they are. You want to map out where the water, electric and gas lines are and where the shut off valves are. The last thing you want to do is run around trying to figure out how to shut things off. Because you don't know how much time you're gonna have. You want to check your soil and put in any sort of conservation practices that you can that might prevent soil erosion or runoff or stormwater, you want to keep your trees pruned and take out any trees that might get dangerous to your farms or buildings. You might want to put in alternative energy sources. So you might want to put in solar in case you lose electric for more than a day or two. You want to keep your waterways, gutters drains clear so that they don't get blocked and cause extra flooding. And then just make sure your buildings and your structures are maintained. So in your home, especially if you have young kids, you may have gone through this where they came home from school with a map, man to go around the house and look at the electrical outlets, the smoke detectors and make sure no plugs were plugged into other plugs and all of that. Those are all mitigation efforts for your home. And those are really important to do. But do those at your business as well do those on your farm as well. You might have a perfect house that passes the mitigation test, then you may have that extension cord octopus thing happening in your farm and thatʻs not a good thing
Mele 3:11
It's so funny you say that because yesterday my son was by the office and he stopped by and he tells me "Mom, you know that when you plug a lot of things into one plug, it's not good." I'm like you guys must be talking about this in school. I was like "Thanks for the reminder."
Nancy 3:32
Well, that's what it is. It's a reminder, right? We mentioned at the beginning that we all know this. But we forget, it's not at the forefront. So So yeah, so as part of your response plan, make sure you're doing mitigation around the buildings and around the farm. And let's make a day of that or something and just make sure it gets done and updated and checked. You want to make sure that you know what your insurance policies say that you're following your insurance policies. The last thing you want is a disaster to happen, and then find out you don't qualify because of something. Yeah. So you want to make sure you understand everything in there, and you've done everything that they tell you that you need to do for it.
Shannon 4:11
Yes. And if you don't understand, ask your insurance agent to explain it. Ask him again. And if you don't understand after that, you might want to find a different insurance agent. Yeah, use examples where you understand it. Like that's a big thing. You really do need to understand that insurance policy because if you don't, you might not get payouts like when disaster strikes. I was like we really need it then you know, I mean, just to keep the lights on sometimes it's not even really about like rebuilding the businesses as much as it is keeping a roof over your head and stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
Mele 4:43
I know. And if you talked about the trees and stuff falling I think where I live that's a big thing you know, up in Ahualoa. It gets when it when we get rains or storms that come through here and the wind and the rain. We always lose electricity. Trees are always falling on the road. or something. So that's you know, another thing some people I know some of the ranchers do is just even clean that like main road making sure if you have something large in that area that you take it out or keep it trimmed back because it blocks your main entrance. And, you know, you might not be able to get out there and actually remove it in time if you have an emergency. So,
Nancy 5:21
Exactly. In addition to the insurance policy too you want to take photos of your property before the disaster happens. So they can see what happened because of this disaster, and update those as well make that part of your debt, June 1, disaster preparedness mitigation day, and make sure you have updated pictures of everything and keep that in with your insurance file. And then when the disaster happens, and it's safe to do so, go out and take pictures again, so that you have that record of what happened. You want to make sure you have supplies, at your farm and at your business. Because a disaster doesn't tell you when it's coming. So and most of us spend most of our lives at school or at work. And so odds are you'll be there rather than home when a disaster comes. So you want to make sure you have disaster kits there. You want to have some food, some non perishable food, you want to have flashlights you want to have headlamps, you want to make sure, I always trick the kids when I'm teaching this. They're all in on the flashlights. They all know to have flashlights. But what else would you be in and it takes them a couple seconds to think of batteries but batteries are very important because the flashlights are not going to work without the battery. So you want to make sure you're having those, and they do expire. So check them we've all seen that oozie, musty, crusty battery thing that's not good. So yeah,
Shannon 6:43
I think it's even more prevalent here just because of like, everyone's generally relatively close to water and salt, it will corrode batteries really quickly here.
Nancy 6:54
So make sure you're replenishing that and checking that have some water at your business as well. You know, in case people are stuck there for a day or two, again, you don't know what the disaster is going to do but if it closes the road on both sides of your business, youʻre stuck in the business until they can get to right. So we want to keep that as a place that has supplies and a third place is your car. Not so much in Hawaii we don't tend to travel as far as on the mainland, but you still would like to have some supplies in your car just in case youʻre stuck in your car,
Mele 7:25
like a blanket.
Nancy 7:26
some water
Mele 7:29
Especially for kids.
Shannon 7:33
You just need that on a daily basis.
Mele 7:37
I'm like, we'll be fine. We have we always have water, we always have snacks in our car. So that's the one place you know, and those things like, they just get replenished frequently. So we know we're polluting the car is always good. I don't know what this stuff we started home for emergencies. But
Nancy 7:57
What you can do, when you check your food at home, one of the things I teach in one of my disaster prep programs is things you can make with non perishable foods and how to make them tasty. So if you find things that are expired, you can make a day out of it. Like oop, pick some recipes with you know, all these cans that we need to get rid of or something. Yeah, so you can Yeah, you want to replenish that too, although most of us do last quite a while. And you want to double check your generators and make sure you have you know that they're charged or that they have fuel or whatever kind of generator that you have, again, not when the disaster happens. But before that, you want to make sure that it's up and running. And then you want to have all your important documents in a place that's not going to get wet. And deed, your leases, insurance, your banking, information, all of that it's going to help you. So the good news when a disaster comes. FEMA, which is the Federal Emergency Management Agency will come and generally can get you money. But there is paperwork upon paperwork to do that, and so you have that all in one place ready to go. It's gonna make your life much, much simpler. And so you want to kind of keep it all together.
Shannon 9:09
Yeah, they do help but is a lot of paperwork to get it. And sometimes you end up buying it before you get the money. And like, I don't know, I'm from Florida. And I remember when you we had like four hurricanes. So I was like,
Mele 9:22
Guys, I've known of some folks that just make binders of like health documents. So everyone's birth certificates. If they needed, you know, parents, whatever, like, you know, we keep I mean for us, we have like our parents and our grandparents stuff all in there, you know, and just have a binder that you know, you can just where it is so you can just quickly grab it with everybody's
Nancy 9:45
Quickly grabbing is important because I don't know well you guys have noticed but there are more and more and more wildfires happening in Hawaii right now. Yeah. And if that gets into your neighborhood, their going to make you evaluate and so you're wanna have things that are portable that you could just grab that Yeah. Not so? For sure. So I would say again, just to reiterate the four steps. So preparedness is the one that we talked about the most that most people are familiar with, hurricanes coming, let's get our supplies. Response; professionals for the most part, but take care of yourself and your family and your community. Recovery; kind of a community effort, kind of big systems. And then mitigation, which is preparing well in advance and taking measures to make sure when a disaster happens that things are not as bad as they could be. And I would say, mitigation is the one that you need to start doing right now. You probably have not thought about it much.
Shannon 10:39
I donʻt know, I think I think depending on what they grow and have and like, raise, I was like drought mitigation is talked about a lot in the States. Like that's why it's like immediately when you say mitigation, I immediately think of droughts.
Nancy 10:53
Right. So yeah, I would say they're all equally important. But know, you should well, it will save you headaches in the long run. So money in probably saved lives, and, you know not, lessen the damage that would happen.
Mele 11:11
Yeah, it'll probably save you a lot on your stress, too. Because if you already know where you're, you know, important documents are what you what your plan is, you know, it takes away from that. Yeah. So I'm sure that there's Nancy, you're an excellent resource, I think for a lot of disaster preparedness information for folks. But do you want to share is there anywhere else that they can go within the county because I know there's other groups within the communities that are resources for some folks to get more information about this?
Nancy 11:44
There's there's actually a lot because disasters happen on local state, federal level internationally even. So there's lots and lots of resource resources. One place to start for general emergency management type information is with the Emergency Management Agency. So these used to be called back in the day Civil Defense be and people might still call them Civil Defense Departments. But in Hawaii, at least they've all kind of changed the name to emergency management agencies. And there's one in each county, and then there's a state one. So the state one is the Hawaii State emergency management, and they call themselves HIEMA, because there's a Hawaii County one. So the state calls itself HIEMA they are the ones that you probably heard a lot about with the missile strike. Yes, They were the ones that yeah, so that was HIEMA. And then in each county, there's going to be one. So there's one for Maui County, Hawaii, Kauai, and Honolulu county. And then on the federal level, there's the one that most people have heard of FEMA, which is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They are the ones that can provide funding at the national level. They also have preparedness grants. So you may want to go online and look and see what they're offering. For preparedness grants. They call them preparedness grants, the probably also mitigation grants, it's the same thing, because economically, it makes sense. If they can get people to be better prepared, and mitigate that's less money, they're going to have to pay out in the long run. Right? Right. So it's kind of like health and wellness, if you can do wellness checks, people might not get as sick. And so it's gonna save money in the long run. And so take advantage of those grants and look into them. Yeah, there might be one specifically for your business, or that you can adapt to your business that will help you pay because some things aren't going to cost money, some of the mitigation processes are going to cost you some money. So if you could get some money to help you to do that, why not. And then the CERT program that I talked about, which is the Community Emergency Response Team, there is a one in each county. And the traditional one, again, is the adult cert. So if you contact cert or you look for Maui cert, it's going to be the adult program that they're talking about anyone that's 18 or older, is welcome to participate in it. Each program is delivered a little bit differently, but it's usually a several week, class, a lot of hands on. So you're not just sitting and listening to somebody talk about things you're actually learning CPR and learning how to lift the wall off of somebody, you actually do that, actually how to lift a wall off of somebody, you do search and rescue. So it's a very interactive and you do learn a lot of things and it's a great skill to have for a community, especially in Hawaii. We're so prone every time. There's hurricanes coming in, you look at that map. It's amazing how vulnerable we are in the middle of nowhere with the hurricane coming at us. So it's it's the more people that could get involved with that the better and then the team CERT. Again, it's through my program. Some counties may have it, but if anyone is interested in it, I am working on bringing the program statewide. Again, COVID sort of got in the way of that, but once we get back up and running, it should be available on each island. And so people can contact me for now, if they have a team that might be interested in that. And I can at least keep them updated on where we are with that. And then the organization I mentioned at the very, very beginning, that extension, disaster education, network, EDEN. So this, again, has contributions from every state, all the universities are members of it. There's a database where you can search for articles and resources by topic, including agriculture, livestock, or you could look up a specific disaster flooding, or pandemic, or whatever it is, and there's resources there. There will also be a state point of contact like myself, in each state, so people can network. And if I can't find the answer, I can get it from somebody else. And then CTAHR, our own college has an emergency response page. It's not as updated as it could be, we're working on it, they do have some information on volcanic emissions, or something on fires and wildfires. There's a section on floods, which is important because that is probably our our number one disaster in the state. There's a section on hurricanes. And there is a section on COVID-19 that has quite a few response articles written on a bunch of different topics. There's ones on how to tell if your food is safe after during a pandemic, and this one's for. I forget now, I shouldn't look that up. But but there's a lot of resources for COVID-19 on that page. And there's a new article that just came up about two months ago in the hurricane section, and it's on preparing for tropical cyclones specifically for farmers. And it kind of breaks down that four steps of the emergency management cycle and has tips specifically for each part of that process of what you should be doing as a farmer. And so if you just want to Google and just look at the whole internet, if you just use the keywords of event management emergency management cycle, yeah, or you just type in preparedness or response, emergency response, recovery, or emergency mitigation, and then a specific disaster, you'll get tons of information on it. But using those keywords will kind of help you focus exactly what you're looking for. So it might be mitigation, wildfire, or response, hurricane or something, and it'll help you figure it out. But people can also just contact me, I don't mind I can try to help them find something if they canʻt find it.
Mele 17:48
Such I feel like there's so much information. You know, the one thing I remember with the missile, you know, you talked about the communication tree. I think that's one of the important things here because we all kind of worry, right? If your family's okay, because like you said, typically we're at school, we're at work or you know, in some of us are at home, and everybody's separated. You know, and I know when that missile scare came, I think a lot of folks could not use their cell phones at that time. You know, so there was no way for everybody to communicate with us. And, you know, we hadn't even know because we live where there is no cell service. So if it's down, it's down, we never even got the message, thankfully, because we didn't panic, you know, I didn't have that, that go through all of that. But in the same sense, we didn't get the message, you know, so it's kind of scary to know that, you know, in some areas on the islands, we still don't get good cell service. So don't rely on that, you know, and make sure you have other modes of communication. And so you don't have to, you know, feel that panic of, you know, what's going on? Or is everybody safe. And
Nancy 18:56
so, one of the big things that comes up when we teach the disaster preparedness CERT program to the teens, we do a whole section on technology, because yes, the cell phones go away. So how do you communicate. And ham radio is the way they communicate because it doesn't rely on cell towers. And when there was the last big hurricane and Kawai that they took ham radio operators from the community, and they brought them all to the hospital at Maui, because that was one of the places that still had power and the electricity and was like a central hub, and they communicated with Kawai through ham radio.
Shannon 19:33
Wow. Wow. Yeah. Oh, we just don't think about all those things until you really have to use them. Right so it's good. I think this is such good information for us. Thank you so much, Nancy for taking the time you know to talk story and teach us I think you you put a lot of things in my head that I'm going oh, yeah, I should probably go into that. Oh, yeah, I should probably go and do that. Ah, Haliʻi was right. You know, so it's a good reminder for everybody you know, on what you should be doing. And so I hope our listeners that tune in are able to use this information and feel a little bit more prepared, you know, at least knowing what to do or where to find the information of what to do, right and especially here in our local areas. So
Nancy 20:22
Just take baby steps, you don't have to do everything I just said tomorrow. Yeah, make a plan, plan to do it and put things on your calendar and break it down into manageable pieces, and you will be less stressed, so it will help you the long run too.
Mele 20:38
Yeah, and all the resources that Nancy mentioned will be listed in the description and notes for this podcast. So you know all the link, we'll put all those links in there for you and in our show notes, or the YouTube channel.
Shannon 20:55
For additional information about this topic, see the links provided in the show notes. Also, just a quick reminder, if you haven't already, please please complete the SOW needs assessment survey. We would love to get hear what you all think about what is needed in terms of you know, seeds of wellbeing for people. Thank you again for listening to the SOW podcast. We greatly appreciate it.
Mele 21:20
Yes, and before we go show some love for your favorite podcast by leaving us a review on Apple podcasts or anywhere you are listening to this podcast, and then stay tuned for next month. And mahalo for listening everyone. I hui ho
Shannon 21:33
A hui ho!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai