Bainbridge Prepares in inviting you to visit our upcoming Disaster Hubs Open House at Bethany Lutheran Church. This is your opportunity to ask question of BP volunteers, learn how to prepare, and find out what services a Disaster Hub will offer after a major incident, like a significant earthquake.

Bainbridge Prepares volunteers played three home games on Saturday May 9: They supported the Fire extinguisher event at the Winslow Wharf Marina, spoke to community members about emergency preparedness at the Farmers’ Market, and provided key support at the Trillium Run.

Here are the five best things you can do today to protect your family.

The two most important things you can do to prepare for emergencies are to ready your household and connect with your neighbors.

On Bainbridge Island, we use the Map Your Neighborhood (MYN) Program to help neighborhoods organize and prepare for disasters. To date, more than 54 percent of households on Bainbridge have gone through the program. If your neighborhood is one of the other 46 percent, you need to get connected.

Our Prepare in a Year program helps you get ready for disasters, like large-scale earthquakes that isolate us from outside help for weeks or longer. By tackling one simple task per month, you can get your household in good shape by the end of a year.

The task for December is to work on increasing the resilience of your neighborhood and community.

Tomorrow, October 16, is the Great Shakeout, that one day every year on which we have the opportunity to share communitywide the experience of practicing for the biggest disaster we are likely to face here in the Pacific Northwest: The Big Earthquake.

Our Prepare in a Year program helps you get ready for disasters, like large-scale earthquakes that isolate us from outside help for weeks or longer. By tackling one simple task per month, you can get your household in good shape by the end of a year.

Ann Cook is one of the Team Leads of our Map Your Neighborhood team. Listen to her talk about how important BP and its efforts are:

Bainbridge Island takes its pickleball quite seriously. Ever since the game invention right here in 1965 by Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum, islanders have devoted time, energy, and intense emotion to the sport. Maybe that is why pickleball lends itself perfectly to emergency preparedness.