There are some great iPhone apps to help you prepare for U.S. National Preparedness Month.
As an avid follower of pseudo-observances, I would remind you that is also Apple Month – the other kind – International People Skills Month and Attention Deficit Disorder Month.
Where were we? Oh yeah, back to disasters. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fire, snowmageddon and the like.
September is a fine time to prepare for impending doom!
As a San Francisco native who took Neighborhood Emergency Response Training (NERT!), I was pretty smug about preparedness until a pipe burst in my house the other night. (The time to remember you still haven’t found a reliable on-call plumber is not when your kitchen sink turns into a fountain).
Here are my five picks for apps to help you get organized.
1. StopDisaster $1.99.
If you can’t stop the calamity, you can stop it from turning into a disaster if you are organized. The app provides a handy series of items you’ll need on hand for various emergencies – floods, earthquakes, high winds etc.
It’s the brainchild of renaissance dude Marco Flavio Marinucci, who sat near me in earthquake preparedness training class. While I rekindled childhood admiration for the firefighters who taught the course, Marco Flavio got the idea to go mobile with the smart lists of stuff they told us to have handy into an app – including shopping lists plus info about documents, pets etc.
2. Phone Aid, $1.99.
CPR is one of the things not covered by most basic preparedness courses (it’s standalone training) this app offers a series of slideshows that will help jog your memory if you’ve done CPR training and, if not, provides some first aid measures to do while you wait for emergency services. Nice perk: it offers American and European guidelines for lay rescuers.
There are scores of apps available for first aid and CPR, this is the app credited with saving the life of a teenage basketball player.
3. wikiHow: DIY survival kit, free.
This may also provide some interesting reading during the inevitable down times disaster brings: the survival kit includes extreme scenarios like how to control a spooked camel and survive a dirty bomb. In addition to those scintillating tidbits, you’ll also get access to 75,000 topics from wikiHow, plus videos. There are categories for natural disasters, home emergencies and first aid, too.
4. American Red Cross Shelter View, free.
For U.S. users, this provides a searchable map of shelter locations by address, city, state, and/or zip code.
Shelter information is updated every 30 minutes from the National Shelter System – so you can find out quickly, for example, that the First Mount Zion Baptist Church in Dumfries, Virginia has a shelter capacity of 200 with 62 current residents.
5. NOAA Now app, also a freebie.
As we mentioned during our hurricane app roundup, this is worth downloading. It provides weather info from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration including: hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic, Eastern Pacific and Central Pacific cyclone basins, mainland storms, including tornado and severe thunderstorm alerts. Get the flashlights ready!
