12/21/2012 Don't Expect the World to End

A lot has been said the past couple of years about the Mayan Calendar coming to an end on December 21, 2012 and other coinciding events such as the alignment of the earth with the center of the galaxy. It reminds me of the last time that predictions were made about the collapse of civilization:
The event on December 31st, 1999 when the century changed from 1900 to  2000--commonly known as Y2K.

The prediction was that computers worldwide had not been programmed to recognize the date change, and therefore dates on computerized documents would show "January 1st, 1900" instead of  "January 1st, 2000." Imagine what that would do to computerized calculations, for example in banks, calculating interest on accounts, or in government facilities with scientific calculations involving date and distance. As a computer programmer at the time, I (like most programmers worldwide) spent quite a lot of my time leading up to Y2K ensuring that computer programs were updated to allow for the new century.

Even so, like many people worldwide, I doubted that every line of code in the world would be changed correctly and in time, and so I made some preparations for outages in the national electric grid and other utilities caused by computer failures, that could affect the supply of electrical power, water, electronic communication, and therefore may result in rioting, delays in food deliveries, lack of emergency services, etc.

Fortunately, on 12/31/1999 nothing much happened. But it did cause me to think about how to survive potentially dangerous incidents that are not as exotic as a worldwide collapse of technology, but are more likely: House fires, terrorist attacks, flu pandemics, hurricanes, earthquakes ... the world has experienced all of these on a fairly frequent basis.

One good thing about the whole Mayan calendar brouhaha is that it causes many people to ask themselves for the first time, "What if?"

What if I was without power, communications, food and water for 48 hours or longer? What if the police knocked at my door and told me I had five minutes to evacuate my home? Do I know what my options are to Shelter in Place (SIP) and ride out an emergency, or to evacuate to avoid one?

Let's use this Mayan calendar discussion as an opportunity to evaluate where we are, what the most likely threats to our well-being are, and what and who we have around us to be able to shelter in place or evacuate if we are ever faced with a more mundane, but more likely event that threatens our well-being.
See you on December 22nd!