Survival Kit Sellers Encounter Complacency About Earthquakes

Selling earthquake survival kits, Roberta Goldfeder has learned, is “like selling funeral plots. You’re not the most popular guy in the world.�

She and Janet Kugel, both licensed vocational nurses, are partners with Gladys Jacques, a registered nurse, in the year-old “Extend-a-Life� Products and Services for Survival.

Having distributed about 5,000 brochures and talked to just about anyone who would listen about the importance of being prepared, Goldfeder, Kugel and Jacques figured a big shake was the only thing that would wake people up.

In the wake of the recent disastrous temblors that struck Mexico, they braced for business at their Pasadena headquarters. “We anticipated the phones wouldn’t stop,� Goldfeder said. They waited. And waited. And they’re still waiting.

Reports of the devastation in Mexico City apparently haven’t jolted many Southern Californians out of their complacency. What preparation advocates are dealing with, Goldfeder said, is the Californian philosophy: “Get up each day, hope the sun shines, get in the car, drive to work, come home and sit in the Jacuzzi.�

Kugel reasoned, “A lot of people are frightened and their way of dealing with it is to forget about it.�

At presentations, Goldfeder said, “we’ve had everybody sitting on the edge of their seats.� But then, she said, most will rationalize that “they have a few canned goods in the house and some Band-Aids and a can opener--electric, of course--so they think they’re prepared.�

Kit Includes the Essentials

Two months ago Extend-a-Life began marketing its family survival pack: a sturdy 32-pound cardboard box containing the essentials--food, water and medical supplies--for a family of four to survive without outside resources for 72 hours. The pack costs $299.

It’s an idea that came to Kugel soon after she moved to California from Minnesota in 1971, just after the Sylmar earthquake. She went into a pharmacy looking for just that kind of kit. “I thought surely if they have earthquakes here every day, there must be something of that sort,� she said. Finding nothing, she put a similar kit together for her family.

Kugel had been awakened to the potential for natural disasters two years earlier when she and her son were “almost killed in a tornado (in Michigan) that took the barn right off and took the animals but we were miraculously spared.�

Goldfeder grew up at Rockaway Beach, N.Y., where “people imagined there was an earthquake out here every five minutes, just like we here think everyone who rides a subway gets mugged.� As an Easterner, she was no stranger to the September hurricane season and, as a nurse, had worked on Red Cross disaster teams. She was also a survivor of seven hours in a subway during the 1965 Manhattan blackout and remembers the chaos that gripped the city.

Kugel and Goldfeder are working mothers and their primary concern is the safety of families at home in the event of a big quake--especially latchkey children.

By design, the founders did not put the word “earthquake� in Extend-a-Life’s name, their reasoning being that the organization might want to expand its market nationally at some point to include people living in tornado and hurricane country.

But in Southern California, “natural disaster� preparedness is virtually synonymous with earthquake readiness. “We’re not talking about nuclear war,� Kugel said.

“To tell people that to survive a nuclear holocaust just takes a box that weighs 32 pounds would just blow our credibility,� Goldfeder said.

Now, just exactly what is a family survival pack?

Packed by the handicapped at the New Opportunity Workshop in Pasadena, the kit includes an instruction cassette, step-by-step procedures for safeguarding a house and its occupants and a form for listing important family data such as medical plan numbers, school telephone numbers and insurance policy numbers.

Said Kugel: “If you don’t have all this information in one spot when your house is down, you may have a difficult time trying to retrieve it.�

There are medical release forms for minor children and a page of instructions (as well as a wrench) for turning off the gas, electricity and water. And there is a booklet, “Earthquake Preparedness,� put together by Libby Lafferty of Creative Home Economic Services in La Canada. Suggestions range from assignments for each family member to dealing with frightened pets.

The top tray of the pack is partially for the owner’s special needs. “We’ve heard everything from shotguns to vodka,� Goldfeder said. “If you can’t live a day without your vitamin tablets, you put them in there.� There are also “pre-disaster preparedness� items such as two five-gallon water containers.

Beneath are compartments for environmental needs, food needs and medical needs. Food items are in space-age foil pouches, prepared by a high-pressure process similar to canning and with a safe shelf life of two years. It isn’t gourmet, but it’s filling: beef stew, macaroni and meat sauce, chicken dinner, Salisbury steak. “No stroganoffs,� Goldfeder said, “just sensible. We’ve eaten them cold and they’re palatable. We’ve heated them on the hood of the car.�

The food is so easy to open and prepare that the young, the ill and the elderly would have no difficulty, they said. It is supplemented by granola bars, what Kugel calls “friendly, familiar food� that children would not find intimidating if they were on their own for several days’ meals.

The granola also serves a psychological function. As a nurse, Kugel said, she is aware that “when people are upset they may need to ventilate a little bit and crunch.�

Medical supplies include sterile eye pads and drops, large medicated swabs, bandages and “combines,� which are heavy tape-on dressings that serve a function similar to that of tourniquets. Goldfeder said that, as medical professionals, they are convinced that sutures and tourniquets can do “do more harm than good� in the hands of the untrained.

There are scissors strong enough to cut through denim jeans, a squeeze-to-activate ice pack, aspirin and Kaopectate, sturdy gloves with which the wearer can safely handle broken glass, alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, toilet tissue and thermal blankets that come in a package small enough to fit into a shirt pocket.

The essentials, following Red Cross guidelines, include water purification tablets, shoelaces, candles, waterproof matches, laundry soap, needle and thread and an AM radio with batteries to pick up emergency bands. There is a 300-pound-test cord that might be used to pitch a tent. Or, as Goldfeder suggested, “The children can use it for stress reduction--jumping rope.�

A tube tent, white with three-foot red letters that spell “H-E-L-P,� doubles as a shelter to keep several people warm or a distress signal to be strung from a tree or tied to a rooftop.

The individual items are available separately and Extend-a-Life also markets smaller kits for cars, boats and airplanes.

The partners acknowledged that the survival kit is no bargain if it is purchased, shoved into a corner of the garage and forgotten. The ideal spot for storing it, they said, is a front-hall closet that is well reinforced. In a one-story house, the master bedroom is a good alternative as, they reasoned, when people are home the chances are very good that they will be sleeping.

They said, too, that if the house burns the kit will burn as well and, Goldfeder said, if the kit gets buried in rubble “you’re in a whole lot of trouble.� But she stressed its light weight and portability.

Their computer is programmed to remind purchasers when it is time to replenish perishable items. And the kit is designed to be used before a big earthquake so that it will not be unfamiliar in a crisis.

“It shouldn’t be this ominous thing in the closet,� Kugel said.

Added Goldfeder, “We recommend at certain points that the family have an earthquake drill, open the food and eat it,� that the medical supplies be used and then replaced as necessary, the environmental equipment brought out for minor emergencies such as blackouts.