Lutheran HealthCare and Red Cross prep Brooklynites for disaster

Several dozen Brooklyn residents chose safe over sorry as they were given knowledge pertaining to household safety measures when they attended Lutheran Health Care (LHC) and American Red Cross’s free emergency preparedness training session on Saturday, March 1.

The two organizations partnered to hold the training session in Lutheran Medical Center’s medical & dental staff auditorium.

Keeping it brief, the interactive training session lasted under an hour. AmeriCorps member at Red Cross Lena Hickner informed and questioned her audience about everything from emergency exits, fire alarms and smoke detectors, to floods, health emergencies, hurricane safety and even warning signs of a possible building collapse.

Hickner also informed the audience about go bags. Basically go bags are backpacks with evacuation supplies that everyone should own in case an emergency occurs in their home. Hickner ran down a list of items to put into a go bag which included contact information, copies of important documents/IDs/contacts, first aid kit, flashlight, radio and extra batteries.

An Emergency Essentials Pak was also distributed to the attendees who registered to take part in the training. ARC’s Harriman Advisory Board’s volunteers used fundraising to obtain the packs that were handed out. The pack included a first aid kit, a whistle, a procedural mask, a blanket, and numerous other items that help ready families for emergencies.

Red Cross Manager of Community Relations Denise Bloise attended the event. She supervised the training session which she said was very important for Brooklyn to take.

“Brooklyn has the most disasters historically year over year,” she said. “We respond to over 800 incidents in Brooklyn a year, just because of the dense population and the infrastructure here. So we want to make sure that people are prepared.”

Bloise is well aware of the amount of help it took to put together the event and hopes that more people will partake in these kinds of programs. She stated, “We’re thankful for all of our volunteers who come out and support us and help us do fundraising so that we could do events like this in the community and provide emergency supplies. We encourage all people to be prepared and learn about life-saving classes.”

For more information about emergency preparedness training and ARC, visit www.nyredcross.org.