The town of Nederland and the Intermountain Alliance coalition sponsored a workshop on disaster preparedness on Friday, February 2, 2024, at the Nederland Community Center. The title of the workshop was “How to Prepare for Everything” with the Director of Crisis Cleanup Aaron Titus as the presenter.

Titus spoke about the need to prepare for dealing with types of disruptions in people’s lives rather than for a specific type of event. By preparing to deal with disruptions, people will have the same responses regardless of the event that caused the disruption.

Disruptions were classified as things like the loss of power, a forced evacuation, or a medical emergency. A disruption is anything that causes forced changes in everyday experiences.

Titus characterized the disruptions as short-term or long-term and spoke about the need to change coping strategies depending on the length of the disruption.

The first 72 hours requires an immediate response like preparing for a short notice mandatory evacuation. Longer durations of two weeks, a month or six months will require different responses like dealing with a flooded house or a lengthy hospital stay.

The core message of the workshop was to identify the types of disruptions that could occur at the individual level and then prepare short-term and long-term coping strategies to deal with the identified potential disruptions.

Worksheets were used to show different external or internal events which were then mapped against multiple possible disruptions. An event like a landslide might create transportation and communication disruptions.

After his presentation, the participants were broken into small groups and each group worked through a particular disruption and possible coping strategies. At the end of each discussion period, one of the groups would present their disruption and solutions. These small group discussions were done multiple times with different members in a group each time.

Crisis Cleanup (crisiscleanup.org) is a disaster relief organization that can coordinate volunteer organizations in a disaster situation. Titus can be reached at 202 669-2969 or aaron@crisiscleanup.org. Miranda Fisher is the president of the Intermountain Alliance coalition (p2phhs.org/intermountainalliance) and she can be contacted at townadmin@nederlandco.org 303-258-3266 ext. 1010.