OK, this time you are at a week long training seminar in a city several hundred miles away from home, but still in your home state. You and another employee (same gender) were sent in a company car for a weeks training, and put up in a fifteen story hotel, with separate rooms. Your coworker is a party animal with absolutely no situational awareness at all, and is not a prepper. They consequently have nothing except ID, a very small amount of cash and a credit card.

You have what you would normally take with you but also included an extra pair of walking or running shoes. Once you settled into your room you picked up a case of bottled water (pints), and a case of your favorite soda, and several boxes of granola bars and some misc. snack food. You have about half of this left.

You are awakened in the middle of Wednesday night by a freak storm that has very high winds, rain and lightning. The storm takes out the power transfer station and destroys a large swath through the city. Included in the damage was the parking ramp that your company car was in. All power and phone services are out for an unknown duration.

What resources do you have, what are your priorities, and what is your plan of action?

Cell phones/text messages out, too?
-Blast

Priorities:

1. My personal health, safety and survival
2. My colleague's health, safety and survival
3. Strangers' health, safety and survival
4. Alert disaster relief and, if possible, family and office of my status
5. Gather additional food/first-aid supplies
6. Volunteer for relief effort

Given the scenario, unless the hotel has been damaged to the point that it is unsafe to stay, I would stay at the hotel. Otherwise, I'd gather as much as I could carry, concentrating on food and insulating clothing, and seek out a shelter.

I figure that within 72-96 hours, disaster relief will round-up all transients such as myself and bus them to a nearby transportation center. The quicker they can get transients out of the disaster zone -- after dealing with trapped and/or injured people -- the better they will be able to devote resources to residents for ongoing recovery operations.

I would normally have seasonally-appropriate clothing with some bias for colder than normal weather. I would have my EDC bag plus most of the contents of my GHB, which would provide enough food for 96 hours (24 in the EDC, 72 in the GHB, primarily via lifeboat ration bars, peanut butter, crackers and jerky). I'd have a good first aid kit with trauma supplies and my prescription meds for the week + 3 days extra, and at least $500 in cash ($200 in my pocket plus $200 in my GHB and $100 in my EDC) plus credit cards (which might be worthless without power/comms). Also an alcohol stove with 8oz of fuel, mylar sleeping bag, DR/AMK PSP, folding knife, multi-tool, water filter bottle, steel cup, flashlight, pocket radio and extra batteries.

Adding in my remaining snacks, this is probably enough food for my colleague and myself for 3 to 4 days, a starter supply of potable water and means to purify more.

While possible, I'd fill all available containers with water, including the bath tub, ice bucket, empty bottles and trash cans with water. If necessary I can purify it later.

I'd rig my room door so I could open it later when the key-card system stops working. Wrap duct tape around the inside handle and let it hang onto the floor. To open, fish the duct tape out under the door and pull to turn the handle, unlocking the door.

Check on my colleague, providing first aid if needed to those encountered along the way.

Determine if it is safe to leave the hotel. This depends on the environment and local residents' reaction to the situation. If safe, hit the streets and look for stores that are open to buy additional food, first-aid supplies and alcohol for my stove. Once again, render first aid and water to persons in need along the way. But even without additional food supplies, between my remaining snacks and contents of my GHB, my colleague and I should be good for 72 hours or more.

Make contact with a disaster relief center. Inform them of my colleague's and my details, status and family/work contacts. Try to arrange communications with family/office.

If safe to do so, volunteer my assistance in the relief effort until evacuation can be arranged. Otherwise, stay in my room, listen to my portable radio and share my food/water with my colleague. Wait for evacuation.

If there is no sign of any organized evacuation effort after 3 days it would be time to consider walking to a more survivable location.

I suppose room service is out of the question.

"Freak" storm, so if the hotel is habitable that's where I'd stay. Shelter's covered. Management surely would accommodate their guests, to the extent possible, with food and beverages. But if the power is out and the weather is very cold, or hot, then the hotel could get uncomfortable pretty quickly. I've never found hotel blankets and bedspreads to be particularly warm - no matter how many "stars" the place may be. And the windows high up in a 15-story may not allow much ventilation.

Contact loved ones and company officials - text messages, probably. Assure them that you and your colleague are okay. See what they want you to do and how they might assist.

In any of the lower 48 states, someone from your hometown should be able in a day to drive at least somewhat close to the disaster area.

Find out in the morning whether the training sessions are cancelled for the rest of the week. You're on company time.

On that note, if your employer takes seriously being a corporate citizen -- or would like the good p.r. of being one -- then they may want to assist with disaster relief, perhaps coordinate delivery of supplies for relief efforts, and you could be in a position to facilitate that with local officials.

A sidenote regarding the OP and practical application.

Thanks to movies, people tend to think that Special Operation guys show up with everything they need on their back, like it was all planned. On top of that, thanks to current trends in travel and the desire to not be seen as a Diva with 8 matching bags, there is this intrinsic desire of people to pack as much as they can at the lightest total weight, smallest footprint as possible.

The dirty secret is that a SpecOp guy or a real prepper doesn't care about how small or light or total number of bags they bring. They will bring more gear than anyone else to the party, though everyone else might just see what he/she has on them.

So just saying that the 'Prepper' in the OP brought some extra shoes, then bought cache items for the room when he got there, is only touching the surface of what a prepper Should bring. All that food & water, plus batteries, portable lights, wet weather gear, portable stove, etc should have been in one big duffel put in the car when the trip started.

I would have thought about, "what if a storm hit (or other reason to be stuck in the car) while we we're driving there or back.

I don't normally travel with my CERT gear but I do travel with my ham radio HT, so that's one mode of communication that would likely work quite well, especially up high on the building. I'd almost certainly have my BOB. Yes, it's with me when I'm traveling with coworkers. Yes, they ask about it and often mock me. And yes, every time I've been mocked by a coworker (or family member) for traveling with my BOB, I've taken something out of it to their benefit, usually my first aid kit.

If I did have my CERT gear I'd likely wear at least my cap and my vest. People will often feel better knowing that someone with a uniform is around.

Priorities for my efforts would be myself, my coworker, followed by everyone else.

As to what to worry about, it would go in this order:

injuries/first aid
shelter and protection
water
food
sanitation
morale

Communication is a special case. It might be lower even than sanitation if all is well, and might be right up there with injuries/first aid if someone was seriously injured and needed to get moved to definitive care.

After seeing to myself, my coworker and others in the hotel, my next move would be to try to hook up with the local ARES/RACES group. If all is well at the hotel (we're uninjured, warm, dry, hydrated, well-fed and singing psalms together) the local EMA would probably be glad to know that. If we need help at the hotel, they would definitely be glad to know that.

Letting the other folks at the hotel know that I'm in contact with the outside world would probably improve morale.

Most likely my move would be to stay put and continue to help people in the hotel and facilitate communications.

This was not a hypothetical scenario for me in some sense. Let me tell you what happened.

First of all, the locale: Mykonos Island, Greece, early 1990.

The project: a 10 day trip to film elements for a commercial for American Express. We filmed at sunrise and sunset only, about 4 hours a day, the rest of the time we had off (yes, it was wonderful).

The situation: During the trip, my hotel roomate was, um, habitually successful with the local women, and one morning, at breakfast, he arrived with two girls on vacation from Germany. He had spent the night at their hotel, and after breakfast, he and I went back to our room, him to pick up some clothes and me to get a shower.

Here's the important part:
We were in a crappy little hotel and the doors locked from the inside, requiring a key to exit the room. There were no phones in the room. Back then there was no such thing as cell phones in Greece.

Now here's when it gets interesting.

While I was showering, roomie left, locking the door behind him. While I was showering, I also was overcome with what was apparently serious food poisoning. While my breakfast took all available exits and fever set in, things went bad very quickly. I cleaned up and dried off a bit and decided to lay down. Within only a few hours, I was weak and barely able to walk, and I decided I needed to get help. Our hotel room was an adobe bungalow with thick walls, about 300 yards from the office. I staggered to the door - yep. Locked. I was so weak I could not yell, the high up window was closed. Surely housekeeping would be along, right? Oh, wait, no they would not be. The hotel made it clear that "Saturday is cleanup day". It was Tuesday.

Surely roomie would be back? Surely someone would notice I'm not on the set?

No and no. The sun set, nobody came, fluids were rapidly leaving me via any means necessary, and I was now so weak I could not even get out of the bed.

I knew food poisoning moves fast, so I hoped that by morning I'd be OK. I wasn't. I managed to make it to the bathroom and to occasionally get some water in, but there was no food to be had. Roomie did knock on the door mid morning - but finding it locked, and with me so weak I could not even speak loud enough for him to hear, he left, thinking I too had located a local hottie (so he told me later).I spent another whole day locked in the room,

By the next (third) morning I managed climb out the window, fall to the ground and stagger to the hotel office. What a sight I must have been (did I mention that nothing I took in would stay in?). They found a doctor who came to the hotel (!) and he told me that it was THE WATER that was causing my problems - everyone "knows" you don't drink the tap water here. He gave me a handful of pills, told be to "be sensible" with my fluids and by that evening I was fairly OK again.

what I learned (and still do to this day):
- While you don't need much food, you always need good water
- Anti-diarrhea tablets are an absolute must-carry in any travel kit.
- Help will not always arrive or know it's needed, you need some means of signalling (and that's why I always have a whistle on my key chain)
- Sometime you have to drag your ass to help.

I'll post my response to your original question later, but I wanted to let people know that things can go from hypothetical to happening now very quickly.

Membership has its privileges

I would definitely demand room service.
I mean C'mon ... this is a big hotel.
Sheeeesh!

The granola bars were a smart move.
You've got some clothes.
You don't have any basic meds - a few would be handy.

The first place to find supplies would be the small room that most major hotels have near the lobby - the one that sells a few extra items for guests. Just necessities. You could probably buy extra granola bars and candy, more water, and some basic pills. The problem is that these hotels are usually hopelessly unresponsive when things go wrong. Meaning that the room you need may not be open, and the hotel manager may not open it in the morning. How aggressive are you willing to be ... wanna' try picking the lock on the door. It's not about stealing - you could leave $$ for items that you took. It's just about access.

Pete2