Whistling Past The Graveyard

By Bob Buddemeier

The opinions and attitudes expressed are those of the author, who has past experience with, but no current responsibility for, READY Team activities.

“Whistling past the graveyard” is an informal idiom that means to act or speak as if one is not afraid or is relaxed when they are actually nervous or afraid… It can also mean to ignore a threat or problem, or to proceed with a task while ignoring an upcoming hazard, hoping for a good outcome.  — Google AI summary response to a definition search.

So who is whistling past the graveyard?  Could be you – Read on.

There is a resident group at RVM known as the READY Team. (Ready stands for Resident Emergency Assistance Designed for You).   It was organized as the Residents Preparedness Group (RPG) five years ago, and has grown into an organization with nearly 90 active members, and a unique role among resident organizations – it is a specific component of RVM emergency and disaster response plans and operations.  Remember that; it’s significant.  To learn more about READY (which I strongly recommend):  Log in to MyRVM, click the Activities & Amenities tab in the main menu, then click on Groups & Activities, and scroll down to click on the READY icon.

READY grew out of concerns about how we would survive, as individuals and as a community, in the event of the inevitable and potentially devastating Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake.  The existence of other potential disasters was forcefully demonstrated by the Almeda wildfire in 2020, when RVM called for an evacuation of all residents.

Many lessons were learned from the evacuation experience, and continue to be learned as we look at other possibilities.  Like power outages, with which we are quite familiar – but so far, only with the baby ones of a few hours.  Consider an outage of days, especially in a summer heatwave or the depths of a cold dark winter.  It is precisely that latter possibility that has been warned about by a Bloomberg News article on the increasing likelihood of radical attacks on the power grid in the days around and after the upcoming election.

So what is the organization READY to do, and why, and how?  Try to pay attention, since one uppercase READY won’t be nearly enough when it hits the fan – a whole lot of lowercase ready individuals will be needed too.

On the midnight shift, there may be as few as a dozen employees on campus to look after nearly a thousand residents — and those assigned to the licensed care areas are required, by law and contract, to remain in their assigned facility. Under serious emergency conditions, it will be impossible for staff to meet resident needs, much less their desires.  The READY team – combined with prepared and informed residents — is an auxiliary RVM resource that can fill SOME of the gaps in safety and security provision under extreme conditions.

1.   Even under the best of conditions, when we are fully staffed and all systems are working, there is NO WAY for the RVM administration to reliably communicate promptly and efficiently with more than a fraction of the residents.  When the power is out, the problem is much worse.

The READY team consists of coordinators for each high-rise floor and for cottage neighborhoods.  These in turn are grouped into areas, each with an Area Coordinator.  All coordinators have hand-held radios; local coordinators talk to their Area Coordinator, and the Area Coordinators talk to the Resident Radio Room, which is in direct contact with the RVM Incident Commander — who talks by radio with RVM staff and the County and City emergency agencies.

Coordinators are first on the list to get the One-Call-Now emergency notifications, and know to self-activate if a major problem is obvious (such as an earthquake).  Once the radio network is established, instructions are passed to the coordinators, who then set out on foot to contact all of the people in their neighborhood or floor, and tell them face-to-face what is happening and what to do or expect.  Not only does this greatly improve the chances that everyone will get the message, but it permits the coordinator to make sure that the message is understood, and to assess and report back on problems.

2. Assistance: Once the communication responsibility is met, Coordinators may help other residents if they can safely do so. They are expected to know the residents in their area of responsibility, including abilities and disabilities that might be important in an emergency.  At a minimum, directing reports of needs or problems to RVM or other volunteers is expected, but many forms of direct assistance are possible. These range from advice and reassurance to opening garage doors without power, helping put pets in their crates, or, in the high-rises, assisting residents with getting access to the emergency power outlets in the halls.

Coordinators are not expected to administer first aid unless they are qualified, and choose to do so.  However, in order to provide as much coverage as possible, The READY team has sponsored first aid courses for coordinators and other residents, and has located medical kits with first aid supplies in campus locations readily available to the local coordinators and other qualified providers.

3. Education and information: In a disaster situation, staff and resident volunteers can only alleviate some of the problems; they cannot prevent or solve all of them. Individual welfare will depend substantially on individual preparedness.  One of the READY team’s major activities, other than training its members, is informing and persuading people about the importance of preparedness – of having a basic inventory of supplies (food, water, clothing, meds, household supplies and equipment) that can get them through the period (several days to a week) before rescue and relief activities are well established after a disaster.

Item 3 in the list above is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most challenging parts of the job.  It is easier to stop arterial bleeding than it is to pound common sense into somebody who is too thoughtless or too optimistic to stop whistling and take a good look at the cemetery. It is all too common for volunteers to get a reaction along the lines of “Why should I do all that stuff?  I pay RVM good money to take care of me.”

WRONG!  Your money isn’t nearly good enough to staff and equip a 24/7 emergency response department.  The RVM professionals on staff and your fellow resident volunteers are doing what they can to help everybody make it through very hard times.  But they know that in the worst case, it won’t be nearly enough.  If you don’t want to think about it for yourself, let them do it, and take their advice.

To download a list of contacts and access to information about how to prepare and how to volunteer, Click Here.

And stop that damn whistling!