Insurance Chief Gives Quake Kits to Seniors

The 35 items are enough to sustain a person for three days in case of an emergency: food rations, 12 four-ounce packages of drinking water, a space-thermal blanket, a flashlight, medical supplies and more.

About 60 visitors to the East Valley Multipurpose Senior Center received the 4-pound, shoebox-size earthquake-survival kit Monday direct from state Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush.

The kit “looks kind of Space Age, like something the astronauts would take with them,” joked Candysse Miller, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Insurance.

Until about four months ago, the senior center regularly distributed emergency kits itself. But budget cutters stopped funding the center’s kit distribution.

The kits handed out Monday were donated by the nonprofit Insurance Industry Charitable Fund. The group passes out thousands of kits statewide each year in the spirit of preparedness, said Karen Chin, the fund’s executive director.

“In particular, we give them out to the elderly and disabled,” she said. “For a lot of them, it’s so hard trying to cope with the strains of daily life that they don’t have the wherewithal to plan for disasters.”