Nobody is coming to save you — That was the point of Capitol Hill’s Urban Survival Fair

Disaster preparedness usually gets framed as an individual problem. Your kit, your plan, your family, maybe even your pet. But last Sunday’s Urban Survival Fair at Volunteer Park made a different case: surviving the next big disruption, whether it’s an earthquake, a heat dome, or an ice storm, is going to depend just as much on knowing your neighbors as on what’s sitting in your closet.

That message was repeated from the volunteers staffing the booths. When disaster hits, the fire department is not coming, not right away, and maybe not for days. The people who show up first are going to be the people who already live next door to you.

While FEMA suggests being ready for 72 hours without assistance, the city of Seattle’s Office of Emergency Management is more realistic for our region, suggesting Seattle residents be prepared for 7 to 10 days without assistance.

“In an emergency, it is most likely that in that first hour after an emergency, you will be rescued by your neighbors and not by the fire department, the city, any of that,” said Nicole Bahr, a volunteer with the North Capitol Hill Emergency Hub, which meets weekly from 6-7pm on the lower level of the Volunteer Park Seventh-day Adventist Church at 13th Ave E and E Aloha.

“It’s going to be your neighbors, and so you might as well know who your neighbors are.”

Bahr’s group is one of more than 60 neighborhood hubs now operating around Seattle, a volunteer network that trains regular residents to act as first responders on their own blocks. As she put it: if not us, then who? Someone has to show up, and in a real disaster, professional help isn’t going to scale to the need.

The Cascadia question
For a lot of people who showed up Sunday, this wasn’t abstract. Several said recent earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela are what actually got them out the door.

“There was a big earthquake that hit Colombia recently, and that really rang my alarms,” said Sita, who came to learn more about supply caches and 14-day preparedness plans through the local hubs.

Suzanne Anderson said the earthquakes moved her as well. “We took that to heart,” she said. “The big one here is supposed to put those to shame. So we are scared. I don’t want to be a prepper, but there’s a big middle ground between being a prepper and not being prepared at all.”

Bill Thomassen, a longtime ham radio operator who spent Sunday demonstrating GMRS radios and explaining how they work, laid out the region’s risk without much sugarcoating: windstorms, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and what he called “very fragile electrical infrastructure.” Lose power, he said, and cell towers won’t be far behind.

“We want people to be okay when things are not running,” Thomassen said. “The cavalry isn’t going to be coming for a while, especially after an earthquake.”

Checklists don’t work until they stop feeling like checklists
Almost everyone we talked to, staff and attendees alike, named the same obstacle: preparedness feels like too much, so people put it off.

“It feels remote and unreal,” said Sally Yates, a fellow North Capitol Hill Emergency Hub volunteer with a background in healthcare and risk management. “It doesn’t feel immediate. Many people don’t even know where to start preparing.”

That’s exactly why the hubs try to break things into small pieces instead of one overwhelming project, she said. “What we hope to do here is accommodate all people wherever they’re coming from in their thinking about this, and give them an easy way to get over that hurdle and start preparing.” As the saying goes, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Bahr described the same approach from her group’s monthly meetings. “One month you think about what should I have in a go bag. And then the next month you might think about, well, do I have my water supplies ready to go,” she said. “You think about it in little bite-size pieces, then it’s much more manageable.”

The takeaways from Sunday’s fair were small, but helpful.

Two of the tables that drew a steady crowd all afternoon were low-tech and a little unglamorous: a demonstration on building an emergency toilet out of a bucket and some plastic bags, and a table walking people through how to find and shut off their home’s gas valve.

Chris Bauer and Alani Mousakis, who live in North Capitol Hill, said they’re putting shoes under the bed tonight, a tip they picked up about avoiding cut feet from broken glass after an earthquake. Mousakis said she’s also rethinking the canned food she used to treat as clutter. “It might actually be really useful to have some on hand for like a week’s supply,” she said.

Anderson said her own takeaway was simpler: relearn where her home’s water and gas shut-off valves actually are. Jamie Ersback, who lives in an apartment and had assumed he didn’t have room to store supplies, said he picked up a tip about lining a bathtub for water storage instead of stockpiling gallons of it.

The part checklists can’t fix
But more than one person at the fair said the hardest part of this isn’t logistics, it’s the social part. Seattle, a few attendees admitted, isn’t exactly a city that makes small talk easy.

“I do want to know my neighbors better, but it’s hard,” Ersbak said. Outside of organized events like Night Out block parties, he said, there aren’t a lot of natural openings to introduce yourself. “People are a little bit standoffish in Seattle sometimes.” He said nothing at the fair had specifically pushed him to go knock on a neighbor’s door yet, and he called that gap a real problem worth looking at.

That’s the exact tension the hub volunteers said they’re trying to close. Yates said the model asks people to check their own home first after a disaster, then immediately go check on their block or building.

“Knowing people in advance makes that outreach easier,” Yates said. “I hope people do it anyway, even if they’re strangers. But it’s easier to do it when they know their neighbors.” In the best case, she said, a building’s residents have already figured out who has a chainsaw, who has medical training, who has a generator, long before anyone needs to ask. “The more we get to know our neighbors, the stronger our community is. The more resilient we are for all sorts of things.”

That’s not just buzzword talk. It’s the reality of disaster response. Cities are stronger when they share a sense of community, and the research backs this up. Studies on government-community disaster partnerships show that when local governments get overwhelmed, the federal government is there to organize a broader response, but before things reach that point, it’s usually the people directly affected who spontaneously step up as first responders for each other.

One researcher cited in this research, Barton, found that in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, individual differences tend to fall away as people come together to help one another.

Whether that lesson sticks past a sunny Sunday afternoon in the park is, as always, up to Capitol Hill. But for a few hours, the pitch here wasn’t really about gear. It was about knowing the name of the person you live across from.

You can join your neighborhood Emergency Hub and learn more about disaster preparedness at https://seattleemergencyhubs.org/.