When it comes to being prepared for a variety of situations, emergency management personnel encourage people to have a preparedness kit. 

Dallas County Emergency Management Coordinator A.J. Seely explains the importance of having an emergency kit to be better prepared for different situations. 

“If you have a spare box or a tote, somewhere where you can store some items, maybe you can put in some water, and that’s just kind of a basic preparedness thing. The nice thing about preparedness, if you go this route, is that regardless of what might impact your water, you have water on hand so by planning for emergencies and making a preparedness kit we can plan for an outage.”

Seely tells Raccoon Valley Radio that Dallas County EMA has been pushing a campaign called “20 weeks to preparedness” over the last month to help people know how to build their kit. Seely says it’s important not to pull things out of your emergency kit unless it’s needed.

“It’s not always a convenience item, it certainly could be during an event but you don’t want to be digging into that emergency kit, taking the resources away when there is not an emergency.”

Seely says you can see the full campaign list on the Dallas County Emergency Management Facebook page or on their website. You can find the Facebook page here and the website here.