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Today we're going to discuss Mindset and how you can prepare on a mentally and physically and what should you expect in an emergency from local, state and federal government.

Associated Press

Damascus, Syria - Syria rejected Israel's demand that Damascus cut its ties with Iran and Arab militant groups as a condition for a peace agreement, a state newspaper said Saturday.

The announcement comes even as Syrian ally Hamas, a sworn foe of the Jewish state, cast doubt on the Israeli government's ability to even deliver on a peace agreement due to the weakness of its prime minister.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357947,00.html

Associated Press

North Korea is extremely close to producing a long-awaited accounting of its shuttered nuclear program, a senior U.S. official said Friday. The documentation would be a major step toward a disarmament deal with the reclusive communist regime.

Although there is no date agreed yet, the documentation is expected within the next month. That would clear the way for a high-stakes meeting as soon as the end of June between the top U.S. and North Korean diplomats, along with the other four nations involved in a deal to put North Korea out of the nuclear weapons business.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the six-nation diplomatic consultations are confidential, says the U.S. insists it be able to verify that North Korea's documentation is complete.

The official says that weeks of preparation with North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia are coming to a close.

The administration's top negotiator for North Korea will travel to China and Russia next week for the final preparatory meetings before the North hands over its paperwork.

Senior U.S. officials said that while in China, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill will meet with his North Korean counterpart.

China is the North's closest ally and the host of the six-nation talks. As host, China is the nation to which the North will formally present the documentation.

The Bush administration rejected a Clinton-era nuclear deal and diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang, and has shunned the North for much of President Bush's time in office. The expected meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and North Korea's top diplomat would mark a major turnaround in relations with a state Bush once labeled part of an "axis of evil."

North Korea said it needed a strong deterrent to ward off a possible U.S. invasion, and exploded a nuclear device in 2006, before agreeing to trade away is nuclear weapons program for economic and political concessions from Asia and the West.

One of the first requirements for the North was a detailed technical accounting of its plutonium program, including the amount of weapons-grade plutonium produced at a now-shuttered reactor.

The United States says the North missed a Dec. 31, 2007 deadline to come up with that paperwork. U.S. officials say the North produced only a partial accounting last fall but is now ready to turn over all the information that the United States and its partners need.

The United States has promised that after the accounting is in and checked it will remove North Korea from a State Department list of nations that sponsor terrorism. Lifting the terror stigma is a special goal of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Under the schedule U.S. officials expect, the United States could grant that concession in June.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357647,00.html

Live Science

Pasadena, California - The Myanmar cyclone. The earthquake off the coast of Japan. The Chilean volcano. Has Earth gone bonkers?

Not at all. This level of natural activity is normal for Earth, scientists say.

"Mother Nature is just reminding us that she is in charge," Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told LiveScience.

A look back at events in 2007 serves to remind just how wild this world routinely is. EM-DAT, the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database, tracks natural disasters in which either 10 or more people were killed, 100 or more people were affected, a State of Emergency was declared, or there was a call for international assistance.

In the United States in 2007, EM-DAT tallied four such tornado disasters, five winter storms, seven floods, two wildfires and a drought in various locations.

Non-EM-DAT events included six U.S. hurricanes and 2,789 earthquakes of which 80 were 5.0-magnitude or greater, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Tornadoes are an American affliction primarily, it's true, but that is a result of geography, Patzert said. About 80 percent of tornadoes in the world happen in the United States because cool Canadian air mixes with warm moist air coming from the Gulf of Mexico, he said.

It might look and feel like the recent disasters worldwide are a cluster of events that could be related, but scientists say they aren't.

"It's totally random," said Peter Kelemen, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354692,00.html?sPage=fnc/specialsections/naturaldisaster

Associated Press

Bangkok, Thailand - A cyclone with winds up to 120 mph. A low-lying, densely populated delta region, stripped of its protective trees.

When Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta and pushed a wall of water 25 miles inland, it had all the makings of a massive disaster.

Forecasters began tracking the cyclone April 28 as it first headed toward India. As projected, it took a sharp turn eastward, but didn't follow the typical cyclone track in that area leading to Bangladesh or Myanmar's mountainous northwest.

Instead, it swept into the low-lying Irrawaddy delta in central Myanmar. The result was the worst disaster ever in the impoverished country.

It was the first time such an intense storm hit the delta, said Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at the San Francisco-based Weather Underground. He called it "one of those once-in-every-500-years kind of things."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354670,00.html?sPage=fnc/specialsections/naturaldisaster

Associated Press

Rangoon, Burma - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the junta in Burma, also known as Myanmar, agreed Friday to allow all aid workers into the country after weeks of refusing access to foreign relief experts seeking to help cyclone survivors.

Ban said the government also agreed to let in aid "via civilian ships and small boats," wording suggesting that U.S., British and French warships waiting off Burma's coast with relief supplies would not be allowed to dock.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357423,00.html

Associated Press

Yingxiu, China - China's earthquake death toll jumped to more than 60,000 and Premier Wen Jiabao said it could rise to more than 80,000 as he and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the disaster area Saturday.

Wen's estimate was a sharp increase in the number of expected deaths from the disaster almost two weeks ago, and could signal that the government is giving up hope of finding most of the roughly 30,000 it had listed as missing.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357928,00.html

Associated Press

Cuidad Juarez, Mexico - Nobody seems to know who wrote the e-mail, which says gunmen will fire at malls, restaurants and other public places in "killings all over the city." But many have forwarded it to friends.

Ciudad Juarez Police Chief Roberto Orduna says the threats must be taken seriously. He issued a news release Thursday assuring residents that police would be more vigilant.

Officials say more than 200 people have been killed so far this year in Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people across from El Paso Texas. Most of the deaths are blamed on battling drug cartels.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357803,00.html

Associated Press

Acapulco, Mexico - A southern Mexican town's 15-member police force has quit for fear of being assassinated in retaliation for a shootout with gunmen, a security official said Thursday.

Zirandaro was the second town in less than two weeks to be left without its police force as Mexico's drug cartels wage increasingly bold attacks against security forces. On Monday, the military took over a town near Texas after all 20 of its police officers were either killed, run out of town or quit.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357761,00.html

USA Today

Mexico City, Mexico - One of Mexico's biggest drug cartels has launched a brazen recruiting campaign, putting up fliers and banners promising good pay, free cars and better food to army soldiers who join the cartel's elite band of hit men.

"We don't feed you Maruchan soups," said one banner in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, referring to a brand of ramen noodles.

The recruiting by the Gulf Cartel reflects how Mexico's fight against traffickers increasingly resembles a real war, nearly 17 months after President Felipe Calderón ordered the army into drug hot spots.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-04-24-mexicocartels_N.htm

Associated Press

Gilroy, California - Firefighters continued to fight a persistent wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains that has chewed through acres of centuries-old redwoods, destroyed at least 17 homes and displaced hundreds of people.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357141,00.html

Associated Press

Windsor, Colorado - Residents awoke Friday to find debris-strewn neighborhoods, houses torn to pieces and trees stripped bare of their spring leaves after a large tornado swept through northern Colorado, killing one person and injuring dozens.

The twister skipped through several towns in Weld County on Thursday, damaging or destroying dozens of homes, businesses, dairies and farms. The storm system pelted the region with golf-ball-size hail, swept vehicles off roads and tipped 15 rail cars off the tracks in Windsor, a farm town about 70 miles north of Denver.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357704,00.html

Associated Press

Kansas City, Missouri - Emergency workers were picking through debris after tornadoes rampaged in western and central Kansas and northern Oklahoma for a second night in a row.

The city of Protection in Commanche County took a direct hit from a tornado Friday, although the damage seemed mostly limited to overturned trees and power lines. The worst destruction occurred at a manufacturing plant, a Commanche County Sheriff's dispatcher said.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357932,00.html

Associated Press

Bartlett, Tennessee - A gasoline tanker has overturned near Memphis and led to the evacuation of a suburban nursing home.

William Hiner, deputy chief of the Shelby County Fire Department, says nursing home residents were evacuated as a precaution Friday because the overturned tanker was believed to be leaking.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357662,00.html

And now for our topic, Your Mindset and What Should You Expect from Local Authorities.

Do you have the guts? The guts to survive a bad situation? The guts to overcome overwhelming odds?

So many of us do it everyday. Chronic pain, joblessness, homelessness, natural disasters, heart-wrenching stories of sadness in the news and still people persevere. And so many of us don't do it - depression, sadness, no gumption, no get up and go, procrastination, laziness, boredom.

So what makes people so different and how do you fix it?

We give up too easy anymore and we expect or demand that someone else fix it, take care of it, drug it, make it go away. It's under OUR control. Where is our fight?

Don't let someone tell you that if you have a condition then your life is over, that you're less of a person. Fight for control of yourself, take your meds, get help. In terrible situations you have to have the WILL TO SURVIVE.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August of 2005 there was a huge failure of the emergency management programs there. But why?

"The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around," said Clare Rubin, an emergency management consultant who also teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management at George Washington University.

Computer models developed at Louisiana State University and other institutions made detailed projections of what would happen if water flowed over the levees protecting the city or if they failed.

In July 2004, more than 40 federal, state, local and volunteer organizations practiced this very scenario in a five-day simulation code-named "Hurricane Pam," where they had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed over half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents.

At the end of the exercise Ron Castleman, regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared: "We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts.

"Disaster response teams developed action plans in critical areas such as search and rescue, medical care, sheltering, temporary housing, school restoration and debris management. These plans are essential for quick response to a hurricane but will also help in other emergencies," he said.

In light of that, said disaster expert Bill Waugh of Georgia State University, "It's inexplicable how unprepared for the flooding they were." He said a slow decline over several years in funding for emergency management was partly to blame.

But LSU engineer Joseph Suhayda and others have warned for years that defenses could fail. In 2002, the New Orleans Times Picayune published a five-part series on "The Big One," examining what might happen if they did.

It predicted that 200,000 people or more would be unwilling or unable to heed evacuation orders and thousands would die, that people would be housed in the Superdome, that aid workers would find it difficult to gain access to the city as roads became impassable, as well as many other of the consequences that actually unfolded after Katrina hit this week.

Craig Marks who runs Blue Horizons Consulting, an emergency management training company in North Carolina, said the authorities had mishandled the evacuation, neglecting to help those without transportation to leave the city.

"They could have packed people on trains or buses and gotten them out before the hurricane struck," he said. "They had enough time and access to federal funds. And now, we find we do not have a proper emergency communications infrastructure so aid workers get out into the field and they can't talk to one another."

Most of those trapped by the floods in the city of some 500,000 people are the poor who had little chance to leave.

Ernest Sternberg, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo, said law enforcement agencies were often more eager to invest in high tech "toys" than basic communications.

"It's well known that communications go down in disasters but people on the frontlines still don't invest in them. A lot of the investments that have been made in homeland security have been misspent," he said.

Several experts also believe the decision to make FEMA a part of the Department of Homeland Security, created after the Sept. 11 attacks, was a major mistake. Rubin said FEMA functioned well in the 1990s as a small, independent agency.

"Under DHS, it was downgraded, buried in a couple of layers of bureaucracy, and terrorism prevention got all the attention and most of the funds," she said.

Former FEMA director James Lee Witt testified to Congress in March 2004: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded.

"I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, 'It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management,"' he said.

Underlying the situation has been the general reluctance of government at any level to invest in infrastructure or emergency management, said David McEntire, who teaches emergency management at the University of North Texas.

"No one cares about disasters until they happen. That is a political fact of life," he said.

"Emergency management is woefully underfunded in this nation. That covers not only first responders but also warning, evacuation, damage assessment, volunteer management, donation management and recovery and mitigation issues."

So what did we learn? That we know about these disasters but didn't properly plan. That people lived in a dangerous area with no training or information. That those people, in the absence of local, state and federal authorities who were unable to get to them were responsible for their own safety until authorities could reach them. That YOU should prepare for yourself, NOW, before a disaster strikes.

Now that said, since your mindset is under control and we have an understanding that you are responsible for yourself, get training. Our federal government has spent so much money on preparedness information that's FREE that I don't understand why more people don't take advantage of it.

Contact your local American Red Cross and go to the Citizen Corp website and get training called CERT - Citizen Emergency Response Team. They have classes, they give you some gear after you pass the class and the information and training is worth the time.

Our government gives you all this information at no charge. They want you to be prepared because they know that they can't take care of every single person in a disaster situation. You have to be responsible for yourselves and your family. There are even neighborhood groups.

Every week I tell you to get to know your neighbors in case of an emergency. Here in Pierce County, Washington we have a program called PC-NET which stands for Pierce County Neighborhood Emergency Team. Everyone in the neighborhood who wants to participate takes the class together, usually at someone's house or rotating houses each week for 6 weeks.

According to the PC-NET website, major disasters stretch county resources to their
limits. It is estimated that regular emergency services will be unable to respond to most calls during the first 72 hours following a major disaster, such as a severe earthquake. Recent events have also taught us that individuals are the first lines of defense when it comes to our nation’s homeland security. It’s time to get to know our neighbors and make our hometowns secure.

If individuals and their neighborhoods are prepared to mutually assist each other, lives can be saved, property can be spared, and emergency services can be freed to respond to the most devastated areas. This will be accomplished by organizing block groups into a variety of disaster response teams, each of which has a simple one-page list that clearly outlines necessary tasks. No special skills or equipment are required to participate – and only a minimal time commitment is needed.

PC-NET goes beyond conventional community preparedness and crime prevention efforts of simply raising awareness – PC-NET means taking action. People and neighborhoods that are prepared will know what to expect during times of disaster, what to do, and how to come together in an organized, timely response.

The Citizen Corps website tells us that, "Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and the recurring reminders of the powerful force of natural phenomenon, we become reminded of our vulnerabilities, more appreciative of our freedoms, and more understanding that we have a personal responsibility for the safety of our families, our neighbors and our nation."

Orange County, New York's website tells us, "Improving our national preparedness is not just a job for the professionals - law enforcement, firefighters and others. All Americans should begin a process of learning about potential threats so we are better prepared to react during an attack.

While there is no way to predict what will happen, or what your personal circumstances will be, there are simple things you can do now to prepare yourself and your loved ones."

Other countries like Australia and New Zealand expect their citizens to take care of themselves in a disaster.

The Ministry of Civil Defense & Emergency Management announced that it recorded
204 weather and geological events in the first quarter of the year, 1 January 2008 to 31 March 2008.

The Ministry’s Director, John Hamilton, said that the breakdown of events highlights what we should expect in New Zealand – almost half the events were earthquakes and about a quarter were heavy rain warnings.

“We live on a group of isolated islands, in the roaring forties on the edge of tectonic plates,” Mr Hamilton said. “That means we are likely to get rain and wind, and earthquakes and volcanoes.”

Historically, flooding is by far the most common emergency in New Zealand, while earthquakes, most too small to be felt, occur every day.

What does all this information tell us? That at some point in an emergency or disaster we are responsible for our own survival. Our government is telling us that they can't help every single one of us.

They've outlined the possible & potential threats. They tell us what to stock up on and
give us lists. They provide free training. They can only do so much but they're telling us that they definitely can NOT hold our hands and provide for every single one of us and the sooner that you realize that the better off you'll be in an emergency.

So, mitigate the dangers to you and your family by knowing and avoiding unnecessary risks. Assess potential problems to personal/family health and to personal property.

Prepare for potential problems in your area constructing shelters or safe rooms, rehearse evacuation plans, create a disaster supplies kit for evacuation and stockpile supplies for sheltering-in-place. The preparation of a survival kit, commonly referred to as a "72-hour kit", is advocated by authorities. These kits may include food, medicine, flashlights, candles and money.

Be prepared to respond to an emergency by preparing as above. Response can take the shape either of a home confinement or an evacuation. In a home confinement a family would be prepared to fend for themselves in their home for many days without any form of outside support. In an evacuation, a family leaves the area by automobile (or other mode of transportation) taking with them the maximum amount of supplies they can carry, possibly including a tent for shelter. If mechanical transportation is not available, evacuation on foot would ideally include carrying at least three days of supplies and rain-tight bedding, a tarpaulin and a bedroll of blankets being the minimum.

And when the immediate threat to human life has passed be educated and prepared to recover.

The most extreme home confinement scenarios include war, famine and severe epidemics and may last a year or more. Then recovery will take place inside the home. Planners for these events usually buy bulk foods and appropriate storage and preparation equipment, and eat the food as part of normal life. A simple balanced diet can be constructed from vitamin pills, whole-meal wheat, beans, dried milk, corn, and cooking oil. One should add vegetables, fruits, spices and meats, both prepared and fresh-gardened, when possible.

This is all under your own control.

http://www.citizencorps.gov/ready/

http://www.co.pierce.wa.us/pc/abtus/ourorg/dem/pcnet.htm

http://www.co.orange.ny.us/orgMain.asp?orgid=79&storyTypeID=&sid=

http://www.ema.gov.au/agd/EMA/emaInternet.nsf/AllDocs/19353533747CB74ACA256F01002468DA?OpenDocument

http://www.civildefence.govt