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8 Comments

  1. If you have pets be sure to make sure all food products in glass containers are secured in areas the pets cannot access. You don’t want your pets eating broken glass impregnated food off of the floor.

  2. I live within sight of the epicentre of the recent Anchorage quake. I thought I was prepared. I found a couple of shelves that the previous owner hadn’t secured. The shelving units that I installed were well anchored to the walls and the rails that came with the system did a good job but the contents of the shelves needed to be straightened.

    Magnetic child locks have been ordered for the china cabinet. The crystal was the only real loss and that could have been far worse.

    We were very lucky in that we mostly just had to clean stuff up and put it back into place, and straighten the pictures, some six times due to aftershocks. Much of our “luck” was due to being prepared. The TV’s were wall mounted and the china cabinet had an earthquake anchor but that didn’t keep the doors closed.

    The rubber shelf liner seemed to help but it was not 100% effective, still, we are glad that we have it. The pyrex was on a low shelf but not on the bottom shelf, we may have to reconsider that when we replace it. All in all, we are making a few changes but not many and nothing expensive. Much of the prepping for quakes is inexpensive like anchoring our metal shelving to studs using long sheetrock screws and fender washers.

    We were lucky in that our power was only out for an hour and a half. If it was still out when the the sun came up I’d have had to go fire up the generator. For that hour and a half I was cussing the contractor that promised to get our wood stove installed last summer. It is not just the shaking but the loss of utilities that you need to prepare for. We heat with natural gas and having to wait till the electricity came back on to find out whether the gas line was cut was of concern. While we got our power back quickly 40,000 customers still didn’t have power the next day.

    There have been literally thousands of aftershocks and a handful of them everyday are strong enough to feel, every day. Two of those I’ve felt while typing this (the low 4’s). Read that article again. I had most of that implemented before this quake and it really helped, a lot.

  3. My family lives up there. Because of the stringent building codes they only had a mess from things shaking off the shelves. Concerning canned goods. My brother had built low restraining strips of wood along the edges of his shelves. All his canned goods came through unharmed. If it’s valuable to you it’s a good idea to secure it.

  4. There is a useful website, USA.com, that you can go to and search on your city or county and state, to find out what the most frequent types of natural disasters and extremes have been since 1950. Knowing these things can help you decide what kinds of preparations you need to make. Apparently, in our area, the most frequent things are hail, extremely strong wind (though not tornados), and extreme winter cold. There are lots of other interesting statistics there too.

  5. I need to do more structural prep for shaky times, but one thing I accomplished was to build in shelving with vertical 2 by 4s attached to both floor and ceiling joists, making that portion of our storage area wall a bit stronger.

    Next I am placing a vertical pillar underneath amd attached to a 12 foot long horizontal 4 by 4 beam,which supports the ceiling joists/collar ties, thus improving the roof support above our garage storage area.

    I already paid for a professional electrical hookup for a generator, next is a battery bank.

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