What would you do in the event of a major flood, man-made disaster, power outage, toxic spill, or health-related quarantine?  Could you survive on your own for the first 72 hours after a major disaster or emergency? 

The 72 Crew Awareness and Preparedness campaign is dedicated to helping you and your family Be Prepared . . . Not Scared. Click on Get Involved to learn how your community can be 72 Crew Certified.

The 72 Crew Awareness/Preparedness campaign has been carefully crafted to augment the preparedness efforts of various existing entities within a given community.  There is an inconsistency between the often-stated need to prepare for any number of potentially dire situations and the actual attention to the need by the average citizen.  The 72 Crew Campaign is  bridging that inconsistency and physically delivering the message about preparedness – one community at a time, citizen-by-citizen.

This is being done with the help of the business community, community leaders, preparedness organizations, fire chiefs, police chiefs, sheriffs and city councils. The action we want to trigger starts with each family receiving the message, loud and clear, that they are responsible for themselves for the first 72 hours after a disaster.

The focal point of the 72 Crew concept is that critical 72 hours.  Obviously 72 relates to that crucial 72-hour period before help arrives; and a Crew is a group of people working together to solve a problem or accomplish a task.

The goal is to create thousands of 72 Crew households, which transforms a potentially unprepared, unaware public into responsible, self-reliant citizens living in 72 Crew communities, cities and states.

Consider these points:

• The average citizen thinks that rescue/help is automatically coming and that calling 911 after a critical emergency will solve any problems they might be experiencing.
• There is a natural, common perception that bad things happen to other people.
• People think that if they don’t have hurricanes or earthquakes, nothing bad happens in their community.
• Some communities are more prepared than others.
  

We intend to dispel the myths and cause people to come off their positions of complacency and lack of knowledge.

We encourage citizens and businesses to honor the efforts of first responders by readying themselves and their families for any number of potential disasters / emergencies.