Being Prepared Doesn't Have to Cost Any Money with Jeff Donaldson

March 28, 2023

78. Being Prepared Doesn't Have to Cost Any Money with Jeff Donaldson

In this compelling new episode of the Tell Us How to Make It Better Podcast, host George Siegal sits down with Jeff Donaldson, a principal researcher at Preparedness Labs and author of the upcoming ebook "Preparedness Simplified." Together, they explore the critical issue of emergency preparedness and the need for both individual and collective responsibility in the face of ever-increasing natural disasters.

Engaging in a thought-provoking discussion to challenge our dependence on government aid, Donaldson and Siegal delve deep into the question of how we can collectively shift back towards community-centric problem-solving in both preemptive and reactive contexts. Touching on topics such as the rise of transient communities, fostering community development, and the very real, life-altering ripple effects of natural disasters, our host and his guest shed light on the importance of individual and collective responsibility.

Topics Discussed:

- Emergency Preparedness

- Individual and collective responsibility in disaster recovery

- Government dependency vs. community problem-solving

- Successful community comeback examples

- Building in disaster-prone areas

- Fostering community development and strengthening social capital

- The impact of transient communities on disaster recovery

- The importance of having an evacuation plan in place

- Repercussions of disasters on individuals and communities

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https://insidemycanoehead.ca

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Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-donaldson-phd-46710473/

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If you'd like to reach me for any reason, here's the link to my contact form:

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Here's the link to the trailer for the documentary film I'm making: Built to Last: Buyer Beware.

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Transcript

George Siegal: 0:00

Hi everybody. I'm George Siegal. Welcome to the Tell Us How to Make It Better podcast. One of the things that I always talk about is the fact I don't think most people take preparing for disasters that seriously, there's a real, it's not going to happen to me mentality. The machine for recovering from disasters seems to keep on going, but doing things in advance to either protect our homes or do things to make recovery easier, doesn't get the same attention. Now my guest today is Jeff Donaldson. Jeff is the principal researcher at Preparedness Labs Incorporated. He conducts research into emergency preparedness at all levels of government, specializing in the creation, delivery, and acceptance of online preparedness messaging. He says there are important things we should all be doing that would make recovering from a disaster a much smoother process. I'm George Siegal, and this is the Tell Us How to Make It Better podcast. Your home is probably your biggest investment, and every week we show you warning signs and solutions to help you protect it. Tell Us How to Make it Better is partnering with The Readiness Lab, the home for podcast webinars and training in the field of emergency and disaster services. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me.

Jeff Donaldson: 1:18

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. It's a privilege.

George Siegal: 1:21

Now, I came across you on LinkedIn and I loved a post that you had up there talking about the goal of going from government dependency to individual and collective responsibility, and I thought that was so important.

Jeff Donaldson: 1:33

I wanted you to elaborate more on that post so people know what we're talking about and then we can discuss what you meant. Yeah, absolutely. The, the idea behind. Uh, our society has evolved over the last couple of decades to look more and more towards government as the solution to our problems. And this, it's not one political ideology or another, it's not a political question. It's that more and more we've been turning to government to solve our problems. So more and more we've been transferring risk management from the individuals that we've always traditionally taken care of, to the role of government. And what's been happening is, is that's required more and more government programs to be rolled out more and more government expends, bigger and bigger government. Um, and I'll be frank, we haven't solved any problem in society by adding more layers of bureaucracy. It's been unsuccessful, but at the same time we've done that, we have collectively moved away from what we used to operate in, was community centric. We used to have a very well connected, strong, established neighborhoods and communities that thrived. They worked together. They socialized to more and more of an individualistic style, uh, approach to problems. If I can't solve it, I'm gonna look to the government. Rarely nowadays do we say, if I can't solve this problem or address it in an appropriate fashion, . I don't look to my community for assistance in those around me. I look to my government and we used to do that. And my argument is, is that we need to start moving back to the idea of individual. And if that's not appropriate, community reactions to problems. Vice looking for, uh, government centric response.

George Siegal: 3:21

Well, perhaps the most important message in my documentary film, which is called The Last House Standing, was to tell people you are your own best advocate. You're responsible for looking out for yourself. How do you think we've gotten so far away from that where people now are so dependent on either looking for somebody to blame, looking for somebody to take responsibility? Where did that

Jeff Donaldson: 3:45

all turn? I think one avenue you can look at is that we started to, um, have more and more, it's a consumption based society. So I think that is the key enabler, is that we wanted more and more, uh, especially in the generation since um, the end of the Cold War and the birth of unlimited globalization, we had access since the 1990s, the rise of Chinese manufacturing, south Asian manufacturing, we've had this access to unlimited number of goods. So we've become consuming more and more, which has made it more and more and more difficult to achieve what we want to achieve. And then if I'm not being successful in comparative analysis to those around me, and social media has done a lot to make it far easier to apparently see the wonderous success that everybody else is having. Um, we start to f you know, is it me that is failing to, to meet the standard? And a lot of people don't like that approach. It's far easier to seek out and find somebody to blame. My government is not giving me, uh, enough benefits, or the rents are too high in my area, therefore the government needs to step in and reduce rents instead of me earning more income. Or things along that line. It's, it's, the whole conversation has changed from I'm responsible for my outcomes to, there is some external exogenous force that's responsible for the discomfort I feel in life right now. I need to identify them and assign blame.

George Siegal: 5:23

And with all the research that you've done, when you look at areas that get wiped out by disasters, it seems like one common thread that I always see, people are very unhappy afterwards, obviously, because their lives are so disrupted, but they're always either unhappy in this country with FEMA, whatever group you might have in, in Canada, as opposed to just acce, you know, taking some responsibility for, wow, I, I put this house right on the beach. Wow. I chose to live in paradise and now I'm wiped out. What, what do you find when you do your research with all this?

Jeff Donaldson: 5:57

The, the, the primary thing that I find is, is there's a, a massive expectation gap between the actual capability and capacity of state agencies, be it local, municipal, state, and FEMA in the United States. Their response and recovery capability and what the public believes they should be able to do and therefore sits at home, doesn't take any necessary measures or precautionary measures because they have this, un, you know, unbased expectation of the government being able to come in and do that. So when the bad day happens, the big bad day shows up, somebody gets wiped out, and government responses are far less than expectations. Instead of people looking in the mirror and realizing it was my expectations that were unrealistic, they would prefer to blame it on an inappropriate response from the government. And therefore, I'm a victim. I'm in the poor case I'm in right now because the government failed to meet my expectations. Well, it's an unpopular argument, but the reality is, is your expectations of the government are far outside, uh, reality. And we, there was a couple of studies that showed if we actually developed FEMA to the level that the American public expects it to be able to do, you would need the national defense budget to do that, to just put it in parameters, like that's what you would need at the FEMA level, to have them respond in a way that people expect them to respond. So instead of sitting back and saying, I've got a gap that I need to fill. The government's not coming. What do I need to do? It's just easier to blame the government and then a k a support the politicians that blame the government.

George Siegal: 7:47

Now, this is way more than just your opinion of this. When you do research about this, you have successful examples of where communities got back on their feet faster because they did what you're talking about. Tell us about that.

Jeff Donaldson: 8:00

Well, I think, um, large scale disasters are horrific, but from, to put my researcher hat on, it's probably the best case scenario that we have. And, and the primary one in the United States has always been Hurricane Katrina because you had a singular event causing a singular similar flooding experience to uncountelss number of parishes. So everybody experienced the same thing. Everybody's homes were flooded out. And then when we looked at the research, which parishes returned and why did they return? The initial response is always, oh, it's the rich people that came back as they could afford to. Well, in fact, it wasn't, it wasn't tied to individual's financial capability. It was tied to the connectiveness and the strength of the the community. The community wanted to return because their sense of place mattered. Their neighbors mattered. The relationship to their community, the community organizations, their faith groups, the stakeholders, they had a tie there and they wanted to go back and they wanted to rebuild, and they worked together through their pre-established community organizations and those parishes return faster. And Katrina wasn't a one off, when you look at the, uh, three 11 disaster in, um, Japan, where they had the tsunami, uh, the nuclear power plant, and the other associated earthquakes in a very short period of time. What happened? They had the same thing. Well connected, strong, tightly coupled, uh, communities with good relationships with their local government. They're back much faster. They draw far less resources and they're back up on their feet and running far quicker than other than other, um, communities. It's, it's the, it's, you know, it's exactly what the research tells us.

George Siegal: 9:53

It's time for emergency preparedness to go mainstream, smart, innovative, practical solutions that match your needs. Instinct ready, educates, prepares and equips the everyday person for disaster. With promo code make it better. You can access comprehensive preparedness courses and premium go bags. Visit instinct ready.com with promo code make it better today. Preparedness starts at home. Now I can see how you get there in a, in a community where people are entrenched that maybe they've lived there for years. Generational fam, you know, families in a community. Now that seem, things seem so transient, new people moving to areas, people flocking to Florida. When an area gets wiped out now, is there any research that shows well, because people are less loyal to the area, they just pick up and move somewhere else and the recovery is much slower?

Jeff Donaldson: 10:43

It does. It does, and it points directly to that. Um, there is a correlation between your tie to sense of place, uh, and the community where you reside, and your desire to push through difficulty, push through obstacles to ensure that you return to that place. So if somebody, you know, if somebody is snowbirding in the, you know, the Tampa area and Tampa gets leveled, they are like I'm not gonna go through the trouble of rebuilding in Tampa. I'm just gonna go to the other coast and I'm gonna find a different place to snowbird and carry on because their sense of place may not be that strong. Somebody who is from Tampa and lives full-time in Tampa and has a strong relationship is going to want to stay there. And that's, I mean, we can go back as Hurricane Andrew is, uh, I think really the first. Socio studies that have been done on, uh, large scale natural disasters in the U.S. I think Hurricane Andrew, I think it was 19, 19 95, was the first one that the sociologists started paying attention to the sense of place and sense of community and those kind of relationships that exist. Are they influential in the decision to return? And the answer today is yes, absolutely.

George Siegal: 12:01

Back in my days when I was a a TV weatherman, every year we would see flooding on the Mississippi and it seems like the same areas every year would flood. And then you would see the soundbites of the people going, we will rebuild. We're gonna dig in and put it back. We're gonna do it over again. Is there a time that research shows, okay, that's not a good idea. You're doing something that is not sustainable. You're building in an area that's that's prone to damage. You need to build somewhere else.

Jeff Donaldson: 12:30

There aren't any places where that's occurred. The only time where you don't see rebuilding is when you have ineffective. You've ineffective, you've effectively wiped out the civilization. So there are a couple of coastal tribes that have occurred in, uh, in Southeast Asia, um, where the damage was so significant there simply wasn't anybody left to rebuild. Now these are in dates and times. Pre weather forecasting when we didn't have modeling, when we didn't have early warning tsunami systems, that type of thing. Uh, but in every instance where we've had a sufficient number of members of the population survive, they rebuild. And a lot of the times where you see argumentative about that is when the government steps in and the government's like, we don't want, like, we don't want you to do this anymore. Like, this is dumb building on a floodplain. Let's move you back, uh, several kilometers. And a great example of this is 2004 when the Indonesian, the Boxing Day tsunami hit Indonesia. Uh, a good friend of mine in a, an academic colleague, she was in charge of the, uh, rebuilding the housing program in Bondae in Indonesia. They had a huge fight because they were fishermen, right? They, their huts are next to their boats. Being, having a four kilometer walk from your hut to your boat is just counter-cultural. So no matter what the government wanted, the, the residents absolutely refused. They simply camped out on the beach until they got permission to rebuild their houses houses there. It's their culture. It's who we are. It's where we are, and they will rebuild there. So this is why you start to see emerging arguments saying, okay, the question isn't going to be relocation. The question is how do we, um, how do we build back so that we have a greater survival? And what we've seen in, sorry. I was just gonna say, what we've seen in a couple of places is they now build tsunami shelters in a number of these low lying islands in the South Pacific. So imagine a tower that's about four stories high with a metal staircases up, and it's just a platform and they just build these things outta metal or concrete in the, in the middle of the village.

George Siegal: 14:57

It seems like it's a, an interesting concept of, of finding a way to be safe if the disaster hits, but when people continue to make risky choices doesn't society overall end up having to pay for it? It's very hard to get good insurance in Florida right now for homeowners, and a lot of that is all the people that get wiped out and, and the people that maybe made a safer choice. The person who built a concrete house over a woodhouse or chose to live a mile inland as, as opposed to right on the beach. How does, how does that settle? Why, why is one person responsible for paying for somebody else's paradise?

Jeff Donaldson: 15:33

Because we don't make it prohibitive to rebuild because we, uh, and, and this is the unpopular opinion, and I'll just be open and honest about it. It, the frank answer is because we, two, two answers. One, we allow them to rebuild. The government doesn't step in, seize the property with eminent domain, pay them pay fair market value, and wish them good luck and make a park out of it. And the second reason is you bail them out. Federal funding shows up for flood victims. Just cancel the federal funding for flood victims. You won't have people rebuilding in a flooded plane. If you, if there's no flood insurance available federally full stop in flooding prone areas. Uh, and you're absolutely on your own. So build your mansion. If it goes under, you're on your own, then people won't build there. But as long as there is going to be some fort of BA financial bailout, somebody still has an incentive to rebuild on that location, right? I mean that's, that's the unpopular blunt answer. That's how you stop it. And in some areas they do come in and say, you know what, um, we're done with this flooding. We're going to use eminent domain. We're going to seize your property. We're paying you far fair market value, no problem. Uh, and then we're gonna take all these homes on the beach front and we're gonna turn it into a park for the state because it's stupid to build homes there.

George Siegal: 16:59

You don't see that much here in this country. Um, I grew up in, in southern California and there was an area in between Marina Delray and the airport. It was like a, a basin, a river basin, a floodplain. And it used to be just wide open and empty. And I asked a realtor, why aren't, you know, how come this hasn't been developed yet? And they said, that's a floodplain. It floods. When it rains here, they'll never build. Now it is 100% developed with condominiums and shopping and all these things, and that has to be insane. You've now developed in an area that you said was a floodplain in an area that has flooding and almost anytime it rains. That thinking is insane to me.

Jeff Donaldson: 17:36

And it's only makes sense. It only makes sense if somebody's gonna bail you out. It's the same argument for the bank system. It only makes sense to do to, to use improper leverage ratios in a bank when you know mom and dad are gonna come pay the bill when you screw up. Right? I mean, that's why banks make crazy decisions cuz the government won't let them fail. And it's the same thing. You build a condo building and you can sell condos and people buy condos knowing that the government will come and give me a great rescue package, or at least a pretty reasonable rescue package when disaster hits. If the government would just stop doing that, people wouldn't buy condos in flood plains, because they couldn't buy insurance from the market. The market would tell them it's, we're not gonna sell it to you. The government's not gonna give you a penny, and you'd be ludicrous to make that investment. But we're not willing to, to make those important gutsy, unpopular calls. We're just not.

George Siegal: 18:41

So then let's just pivot back to what you're talking about. How do we now foster greater development in the community? So people say, okay, I'm here, I'm in, and then when the disaster hits, they do what you say, it's easier to rebuild.

Jeff Donaldson: 18:55

So if you work backwards, And you look at communities that have far greater outcomes and we're just not marginally better outcomes, we're talking significantly better outcomes post-disaster. Um, all you have to do is you work back and see what did they do? Well, what they did is they first created a strong community. So community organizations, community centers, Do you know your neighbor? Do you know everybody that's on your street? Uh, that takes a couple of people to grab ahold of leadership positions and start advocating for things that matter in the community. People flock to leaders who advocate. You build strong community. Then these communities that bounce back far better also had that important relationship with their municipal and local government. So, . In theory we call it linking social capital cuz it's across a, uh, power barrier. There's a power differential between citizens and the government. And so if you have a strong relationship through your community groups across that barrier, then you will get disproportionate services and benefits from the government. You're closely linked, the government cares about you, they know about you. You have a strong relationship. These are what the communities did, because then what you have is people who work together going, Hey, listen, it flooded last time. I'm not letting you respond that way anymore. Here is a list of things you're going to do, Mr. Government in your next response, and we're going to hold you to it. Right? When you have a group of citizens who are advocating for something, they get closer to their outcome. When you have a group of citizens who whine and complain about the government, they don't get better outcomes from government and so organized. It's like labor. When you have a bunch of employees that are angry at their employer, not much happens. But when they unionize and use collective bargaining and strike action, all of a sudden the the, the employer has to pay a lot more attention to their grievances and ameliorate their grievances. Well, community operations are not that different. And none of this costs any money. None of this requires you any type of sum investment. It's just saying, you know, I've got 40 families that live on my street. If we speak with one voice to the government and demanding services and demanding change and demanding things that occur to protect my neighborhood, um, um, it works. And these are the, these are the communities that then, because they have that strong sense of community, When struggles hit, when disasters hit, the homeowners can count on their neighbors to come help them clean out the basement, to bail out the basement, to help them with water pumps, to use their generators for power and things along that lines. You get a sense of cooperation, a sense of place, a sense of norms, of reciprocity. If you're my neighbor and I help you out, there's a norm of reciprocity there. I expect you to help me and that works.

George Siegal: 22:06

Now it seems like, okay. Okay. I'll give you an example. I'll use my neighborhood. Not a lot of people have gone through the expense of putting in generators. Anytime the power goes out in a storm, you know the people that have 'em. So I may have chosen to put a generator in, my next door neighbor may have chosen to buy, uh, a boat and to go camping and to go do all these things, other things with that money. Now the disaster hits. According to the, if we're a community, let's do it together, all of a sudden, do I have to become the community leader when I gave up things so my family could be safe? It seems like there's a conflicting, uh, feeling of spirit here.

Jeff Donaldson: 22:46

And the, the two viewpoints of that is one in, uh, after the event, it's a little late to start bonding in the community, though it does, it can build the, the beginnings of the bond for the next event. But, Strong communities will have this conversation beforehand. Strong communities will understand, like, what do you think? What, what are your thoughts and what we might think about doing around here. If, if we get a, a side swipe from a category two or three hurricane, I mean, nobody's talking about a direct hit from a five. You're all getting in your car and you're leaving the peninsula, like you're not hanging around. But if we get a side swipe from a two to three category hurricane, we lose power for a week. What does that look like for you? How, how, why don't we all get together and figure out how we can collectively be ready to prepare? Those type of conversations is what builds a strong community, and those happen prior to the event. But if you don't have a positive relationship with your neighbors, it's hard to start.

George Siegal: 23:49

Does your research show anything about how short people's memories are for the communities that got a near miss? So, for example, hurricane Ian was a bullseye for Tampa. They were talking about it for a week that we were, that was our doomsday scenario. I, I, you could see the fear in broadcasters' eyes down here. All of a sudden the storm turns, which quite often they do, and it pummeled a beautiful area of this state. And I think people in Tampa collectively went phew, we're good. That's the wrong attitude after seeing what could have happened.

Jeff Donaldson: 24:23

Yeah, a absolutely. And uh, my brother-in-law was actually, uh, on an exchange posting at an American Air Force base just outside of Panama City and, and, uh, ended up having to come back to Canada cuz he was totally destroyed out of a home and no place to live down there. Um, but, Research tells us about 18 months, to be frank. It's about 18 months after a disaster, when somebody's worry or considerations for that event have waned to go back to the state they were before. So if you're in a situation where most of the southern US is, where you're only seeing a, a significant hurricane threat once every five to seven years, let's say on average in a region that is not frequent enough to sustain all on its own without any assistance, a higher degree of preparedness in the population. Now, you would think that, that all you would need is one scare like that for everybody to realize we probably should take this more seriously. Um, but the research says, no. No, it's, it's, it's arguably the same problem we have in preparedness when we say try to advocate for more money in the government.. It's very hard to get the government to spend more money on preparedness when there are 15 different competing priorities and, and helping to fund first aid training at the community level is probably not right up there on the reelection bingo chart. Right. So it's hard to win.

George Siegal: 25:58

You know, I would argue 18 months sounds way longer. I mean, I think people here, and I'm just talking for just people in my immediate circle, were like, . I mean, they just went on like Floridians almost seem like the people in New Orleans that go out on Bourbon Street and Party when the hurricane's coming. Yeah, because they're just used to living with that and aren't worried about the fear. But we have enough evidence to show what happened. Almost everybody here has been to Sanibel Island or has been to Fort Myers, and they see that paradise just completely obliterated. Yeah. I don't know how you get a better wake up call than that?

Jeff Donaldson: 26:35

Because it's not happening in my backyard and I don't physically see it and experience it. Um, and that's, people have been to Sanibel Island and I've seen all of the photos of, of that place and the devastation and the attempted rebuilding and the arguments about opening it to public and not opening it to the public. But, uh, if it's not there, there's, there's a re we call it a recency bias, uh, to a lot of experiences in the first month after a side swipe from a hurricane, you're still gonna be talking about it because you're still going to see evidence of cleanup around you. But as soon as that evidence of cleanup goes away and the fight with the insurance company, which is you and the insurance company, but it's not public, people don't see it, it goes away and every other struggle, discussion issue of the day pops up and off we go. You know, it's like how long does it take an event to go from page one to page 17 of your local paper? It's the same thing. It's recency bias. People don't wanna read about insurance claims from a hurricane six months ago. They don't care.

George Siegal: 27:44

The problem too, is the media leaves a couple days after the storm, um, sometimes right after the storm to go to the next location that it's going to hit, and they don't see the struggles that people have. We have people from our film in Mexico Beach and Panama City that are still fighting over insurance. They're still fighting over construction. The same thing in Malibu, California after the wildfires. Um, they don't understand that it can be life altering what happens to you? It's not, we may say 18 months, that's for people to go back to normal that weren't wiped out. But the people that were, sometimes, they never recover.

Jeff Donaldson: 28:17

And they, and they don't. And because their numbers and their voices are so small, they're statistically insignificant to the rest of the community. So the com, their community will, will never forget. Never forget. And they will always have it on their memory. Um, but everybody else in the state won't. Everybody else in the state will move on. The wildfires everybody will talk about them, but they won't talk about the devastation in that little town. I wonder how those people are doing today. I wonder if they're doing okay. That's not a conversation that pops up.

George Siegal: 28:56

There was a good documentary made about Paradise, California. I think it was Ron Howard and his, uh, team where they followed a bunch of families around for a year afterwards, and, uh, incidences of divorce, of people that were out of jobs that their lives were completely ruined. Absolutely heartbreaking to see because we don't really understand the ripple effect of that disaster. Sure. That beachfront hotel might have been wiped out. Now we have to think about all the people that worked there, all their families, all the, where their kids went to school. I mean, the, it, it's just, it's, it's, it's really overwhelming to think about and, and most people don't want to think about it. They probably don't think about it.

Jeff Donaldson: 29:32

And they don't, and this is the part of the, the disaster impact. It rarely gets public, but it is very l very closely linked to the recovery of a community is, you know, it's not just your home that was leveled, it was your business. You're either the owner of the business or you work somewhere if your employer gets leveled our, your desire to return is directly correlated to your ability to return your kids to school. Is the school reopening? Is your job available? I mean, if none of those things are occurring, and you've gotta get kids in school in a very short period of time, post-disaster, and there is not a solution for that, that hinders a lot of families with young children to come back to the place. So the impacts of disasters just aren't your home right? You can, you can get an apartment 45 minutes away, um, and, and, and still have a life. The problem is, is that if you don't have a job and you don't have a kid's school to go to, and all of your community organizations are gone, and nobody is taking a leadership position to put that back in place, what, what happens is without those key critical pieces of infrastructure being re reconstructed and built, people don't have a desire to come back, or their desire is far less. They will go to where they can put down roots and maybe in the back, I hope, you know, I'm gonna come back to Tampa in a couple of years when they sort it out. But the reality is they don't. I mean, when we look at the returning populations to Katrina, um, they didn't, they didn't come back three years later. They just didn't. Those that came back, came back fairly rapidly. Rebuilt their communities, were all over the government, um, to get the critical infrastructure up to not only get the water sewer running, but get the community centers back up, get the schools back up. Um, they came in and when people flock in, I'm not gonna reopen my business if they're, I don't have customers. Right? If I'm a business owner and nobody comes back to that parish, why am I gonna reopen my fish and chips restaurant. If I don't have customers what's the point? Right? So those did, but those that went away three years, they, uh, they, they just didn't come back. Not, not in any significant measurable numbers.

George Siegal: 32:01

I think people also need to understand that disasters, sadly, they don't just bring out the best in people, the, the first responders and the heroes that come in afterwards and, and, and rescue people that might be stranded or struggling. But it also brings out the lowest of people that then come in and prey on the victims, charging them $10,000 to throw a tarp on their roof, uh, taking their insurance money and saying they're gonna help them rebuild their house. I mean, the, the amount of scams that we encountered were just overwhelming. And so people aren't just dealing with the disaster, now they have to, uh, deal with being victimized by criminals.

Jeff Donaldson: 32:35

Yeah. And then, and, and this is again, this is a function of how, how, what is your recourse in a free and democratic society short of hunting them down? Um, your recourse is the court system. Well, if, uh, the government doesn't rebuild and reestablish the court system very quickly or they don't surge capability and capacity into the court system, now you have people that I found Jones Construction, and, pardon me, if there's a Jones Construction, this isn't against you. Um, but if Jones Construction scam 10 people and 10 people wanna take them to court and they're looking at a three and a half year wait to get their civil case heard, well, Jones Construction has long since folded. They've gone, they, the, the money's gone. And so, What we've been arguing for, and we just, a bunch of us that study in this, is that there needs to be a post-disaster recovery construction framework, preestablished. Not done after the disaster, it's too late. So right now, how are construction companies going to be allowed to rebuild in Tampa? That needs to be written right now. When everything's in peace and calm, you need to have a very strict set of regimented guidelines as to how construction companies are going to be permitted to operate in a recovery situation. That's where the government can work. That's where the government has to come in and set a regulatory framework because then what you get is people go through a government system to get access to a contractor. And then it's not you and I chasing the contractor when they failed to do something. It's the IRS. And if we know anything about the I R S, they're reasonably successful. Um, and you know, every, every big criminal in the United States history, they go down for tax evasion. Every one of them, it's, they get'em on tax evasion and racketeering. They don't get 'em on drug crimes. Um, so, but that's the kind of work that community organizations can advocate for. Building what we need before we need it. Not scrambling around because you're right, crimes of opportunity will happen and construction companies will show up out of the blue and they'll take deposits and they'll make promises and they'll get rich and they'll dissapear.

George Siegal: 34:58

I'm leery of giving anybody a deposit with the way businesses run now, and especially assigning your insurance benefits to somebody, people should never do that. I mean, that is the, the stories that people that had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because the insurance now went to that crook. Yeah. And that's just, that's just so sad when that happens. So give us something positive. Give us an ultimate takeaway here of what should people be doing right now? Hurricane season's coming up. What should we be doing? What's our number one course of action?

Jeff Donaldson: 35:32

I, I'll give you two points. Two points that are important. One is to build your community. So get to know your neighbors, get to know each other, uh, and once you build a reasonable level of relationship, initiate the discussion about what do you think we're going to do when something bad happens? What do you think we're going to do? What? What do you think the best course of action for us is collectively to do if we have a power outage, if we have a flooding situation, if we have a number of homes of wind damage. Do you have a tarp? I have a couple of tarps. Um, do you have ladders? I have ladders. Why don't we look forward and we can help each other out by doing this? Those type of basic, uh, discussions to build that sense of place and that sense of relationship so that when the bad day happens, you're not trying to buy a tarp because your neighbor's got three and you've already had that conversation. But the number one thing I will always say to people who are in a hurricane zone is it's up to you to have an evacuation plan. Absolutely. Unquestionably. And you need to know the destination you're going to now. The exact address. Don't wait to try to think you're gonna get yourself a hotel three towns over cuz they're gonna be booked in seconds. If not, at triple the price you need to find a reasonable place that is within a driving distance. Friends, a relative, and I'll give a prime example for me, and I use this all the time on, on my podcast, is I have a friend, a good, good family friend, and we have some reciprocal agreements. I can come to his house unannounced with my family. He can come to mind unannounced with his family. We're about 200 kilometers, so about 130 miles apart, 140 miles apart. So we're far enough away that we likely both won't get smoked with the same incident. And we have agreements that we can stay long term in each other's basements. And so when I have to evacuate, I know exactly where I am going. I know I'm welcome there. And I know I'll be able to shelter there. So I'm not just jumping in a car and going to some random town I've never been to in the hopes that Motel six will be able to put me up. And then I'm feeding cheeseburgers to the family off of cranked up prices everywhere, competing all of this, um, with others because then what it allows you to do and you've talked in podcasts before about the, the, the difficulty fighting with insurance companies. Well, wouldn't it be a lot easier if you're sitting in your friend's basement with a cold beer after a nice meal talking on their phone and through their wifi and their internet instead of some random hotel, internet, uh, fighting with your insurance company, right? You set yourself up for success. This doesn't cost you any money. Your evacuation is largely free and you get to go. And the key with evacuation is always when they recommend to go, that's the time to go. If you wait until they tell you it's mandatory, it's too late because you will see those lined, cranked, packed highways. So if somebody says, we're putting in a voluntary evacuation order because of an impending hurricane, yeah, go visit your family friend 200 miles away. Spend the weekend at their house. Worst case scenario, you get to have a couple wobbly pops and some steaks on the back deck.

George Siegal: 38:58

You know, it's a little tougher when you live on a peninsula because with Hurricane Ian, we had friends that went to Orlando and they evacuated to Fort Myers because they thought the storm was coming here, , and those are the two areas that got hit harder. So yeah, you really have to pick a place that's completely out of the cone. Yep. Because if not, you're gonna end up having the storm follow you.

Jeff Donaldson: 39:21

And so mine is only, uh, like I said, about 120 miles away because I'm not in a hurricane zone. I face the risk of, um, ice storms and I face the risk of earthquakes. And we, it's bad here because we don't build anything to earthquake standards. So when we get an earthquake, it's, it's a shuttering effect. I've been in the last one we, big one we had here was about 12 years ago, and it was a pretty serene experience to go through an earthquake and hanging onto your desk as the whole thing is shaking and rattling and rolling. Um, but the, my friend doesn't live in the earthquake zone.

George Siegal: 39:59

That's nice. I've been, I've been in some bad earthquakes. I'm, I don't like those anymore than, uh, than hurricanes. They're, they're pretty bad. Now you have a couple other things going on that are pretty cool. You have a, a successful podcast you've been doing for a number of years, and you have a book that's coming out.

Jeff Donaldson: 40:13

Yeah, absolutely. So I started inside my Canoe Head podcast, which is available on all platforms in, uh, April of 2020. When I saw the public reaction to the pandemic when life went completely uncertain. People lost their jobs. People were locked down. Whatever your government decided to do to you, or for you, depending on your political perspective, uh, people's lives were turned upside down. And I quickly realized that nobody really had a clue what to do or, or really could find a place of good advice. So I started the podcast to provide advice and individual emergency preparedness. How to take the steps necessary to build yourself and then subsequently your community. So that's been going on. Now we've got a, I put the hundred 63rd episode up this morning on preparedness supplies, so you know, Realistically, how do you determine what you need in your house? It's not off a PDF form filler. There's a little process you go through and then when you find a gap, you identify it. So it's that kind of practical advice to individuals. And the book that we have coming out in a couple of weeks is called, uh, Preparedness Simplified. It's basically a quick how to 40 page e book, that's gonna be available on our website inside my canoe head.ca that basically says, Hey, listen. Um, the first step is to take care of you because in zombie land, like they say, the number one thing is cardio, right? So pe well, people fail to realize it in, in, in my humble opinion, that, uh, number one thing in preparedness is your physical, your mental, and your financial health. Then you worry about food in your basement. Because I don't care what stockpiles you have piled up in the basement, it's not gonna be much good to you if you are in the wrong mindset or if you are broke and you are, um, really unhealthy. So we, we work on that. Let's, let's get you up and running and then let's get your household up and running and subsequently your community. So that's the beginning of a series of books that we're gonna be releasing for people to just say, You know, it's, it's, it's not hard because you take a, you take a drive by of YouTube and uh, it sounds like the apocalypse is coming, society's collapsed, world War 3, nuclear bombs, all that. And we're like, no, no. That's not really what's gonna happen.

George Siegal: 42:37

I love, I love the message. I'm gonna definitely check out the podcast and read your book when it comes out. And thank you so much for your time, Jeff. Great information. I really appreciate.

Jeff Donaldson: 42:45

Oh, it's my pleasure. It's a privilege. Thank you.

George Siegal: 42:48

Thank you for listening to the Tell, Us How to Make It Better podcast. All of Jeff's information can be found in the show notes. And if you have any ideas for future podcasts or an interesting story of your own that you'd like to share, I would love to hear from you. There's a link to a contact form in the show notes. All my contact information is in there as well, along with a link to my documentary film, the Last House Standing. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.