Danger Fellow Citizens!
Yesterday we received in our mail a booklet from the San Diego County Office of Emergency Services. It contains all sorts of dire warnings and suggestions for living, and not quite dying, out here.
Basically, the idea is that every citizen is supposed to be prepared to survive a minimum of 72 hours after an emergency without any help from the government. Gee, thanks. And why am I paying taxes?
So, you’d think if they were going to scare the hell out of us and try to encourage participation they might have made the thing easy on the eyes, right? Something to inspire the people to action? Hell no:
Note the happy children contrasted by the scary emergencies! And that fine (ahem) photoshop work.
Blech.
It gets most improbably worse. At the bottom of each page they run a banner:
What the hell is that thing? A human squashed like a bug on a windshield? Ew! That makes me feel secure…not.
The content is a bunch of lists of supplies which, if any normal Californian got all of, would leave absolutely no room in the house in which to live. Batteries and moist towelettes, sure, but “powdered chlorinated lime” to put on the raw sewage you produce and store in the “large plastic trash bags for waste sanitation.” Ew. “Blankets or sleeping bags for each member of the family” are needed as well as at least one gallon of water per person per day (family of 4 needs at least 12 gallons) and heavy gloves and heavy shoes…who has space for all this stuff?
Then there are all the fill in the blank bits for information like reunion sites, out-of-area contacts, where all this crap is stored, who learned CPR, etc. And don’t forget to draw a plan to scale of your house to go over all the different possible emergency procedures–what do do in an earthquake versus a fire versus a terrorist attack, etc.
All in all, one terribly ugly, poorly written, and almost completely useless publication…and a waste of taxpayers’ money. Bravo.