"We knew you'd come, Mom," they said. Jocius was enormously proud of her girls. They had followed the rule of the house for an earthquake, to drop, cover and hold, and then evacuate.

"We had practiced fire drills and earthquake drills," Jocius says, so the girls knew just what to do. If the children were in the rear of the house, "I showed them how to get the back window open so they could get out and go sit on the swing set. If they were in the front of the house, they were to go out the front door and sit on the fence."

Jocius' passion to prepare her girls for emergencies led her from local PTA mom who designed school preparedness plans to an increasingly well-known expert in the emergency management community. She was at the forefront of designing the disaster preparedness programs for Sunnyvale and Cupertino.

Because of her energy, her humor and her passion, she became a popular speaker and eventually spoke at professional events from Arizona to New York, to audiences that included traffic managers, emergency managers, medical groups and more.

She became a keynoter at international events. In 1998 she addressed the World Aid Conference in Geneva sponsored by the United Nations. In 1999 she spoke in Puerto Rico at the Department of Civil Defense Conference on Earthquakes.

Leaders from Turkey heard her speak in Geneva and in 2000 invited her to Ankara, Turkey, to speak following that country's disastrous earthquake.

Her niche is the role of non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross, churches, relief agencies--and their place in disaster recovery. "My role was to speak on how these organizations came together in California after Loma Prieta."

Her children's well-practiced response to the Loma Prieta earthquake was where it all started.

"If you're prepared for an earthquake in California, you're prepared for anything," Jocius says. "An earthquake--it's manageable, and it will happen. There's more than a 50/50 chance that a catastrophic event will happen here in [Silicon Valley]. And we need to get prepared."

Teaching comes naturally to Jocius, 56, and she has strong ties to the community. She is a third-generation San Josean. Her grandfather, Thomas Monahan, was mayor of San Jose from 1910 to1914. She attended San Jose State University for two years before transferring to Brigham Young University in Utah.

Following graduation, Jocius moved to Sunnyvale, sold real estate and met and married her husband, Don, who is a dental technician in Palo Alto.

While her family grew, Jocius was a stay-at-home mom. She developed a repertoire of 25 classes, from food storage to making Dutch ovens, which she taught through adult education. Most of her classes were about emergency preparedness.

"I'm a product of the Mormon Church," she says. "I learned through the Women's Relief Society" at church about food storage, water supplies and emergency items.

As her girls started school, Jocius asked the principal, "What are you doing for my children for emergency preparedness?" She became the emergency preparedness coordinator at Columbia Elementary School (now a middle school) and wrote a school emergency preparedness plan. Asked to put together a model for the district, she wrote the Sunnyvale School District's emergency preparedness plan and ran it as a volunteer.

After 12 years of volunteering and teaching what she called "supporting-my-hobby classes," she returned to San Jose´ State University and earned a master's degree in instructional technology. While working on her thesis, she learned there was nothing available for schools on emergency preparedness, except what she had done. So she researched and designed a curriculum.

"I have a passion here about the children of the world for preparedness," Jocius says.

In graduate school, she began an internship with the city of Sunnyvale. In return for computer access to write her thesis, she agreed to write an emergency plan for the city and to train city workers.

She finished her graduate degree in 1987 and went to work full-time as Sunnyvale's first emergency planner.

Preparing neighborhoods

About that time Jocius and others began planning a neighborhood preparedness program, which they called SNAP--Sunnyvale Neighborhoods Actively Prepare.

"It's a snap to prepare; be ready in a snap," Jocius says. She mapped the community, held meetings every night in schools and trained neighborhoods to be on their own in an emergency for 72 hours.

This grew into an award-winning program. SNAP was unique to Santa Clara County when it began in 1988 and unique in the state. It was in place before the Loma Prieta quake.

"We're proud of that," says Cherel Sampson, an emergency planner with Sunnyvale. The SNAP program has since been adjusted to Federal Emergency Management Agency guidelines, so it offers the same curriculum as any other neighborhood emergency preparedness program in the county. In Cupertino and other communities, the group is called CERT--Community Emergency Response Team training.

As SNAP was getting started, the Jocius family welcomed its fourth daughter. Jocius was overwhelmed. The new baby, the nights and the job proved too much.

Jocius slowed down a little when she took a part-time job as an administrative specialist in the Cupertino city manager's office. The city couldn't afford an emergency planner at the time. Jocius' job description included risk management, emergency and community preparedness. She was the first person in this job.

Others saw the need for more preparedness. Marsha Hovey, the emergency services coordinator for Cupertino today, was a 911 dispatcher for the county when Loma Prieta struck. The earthquake "changed my thinking when I saw how quickly dispatch was overwhelmed and the county was overwhelmed. Every police car, ambulance and fire truck was gone in the first 60 seconds. It took us six hours to catch up, and that was only with the 911 calls that could get through. That meant for the lady in labor and the man with the heart attack, there was no ambulance.

"The public panicked, and Loma Prieta was not the big one. Not even close," Hovey says.

"If you falsely believe you can call 911 and someone will come, you are setting yourself up for disaster. When cuts, bruises and basic first aid cause ambulances to be used up, then they are not available for a true emergency. There are limited resources. People need to be able to take care of themselves," Hovey says.

According to Cupertino native Lynne Capener, Loma Prieta was a wake-up call for neighborhoods. Jocius helped Capener organize her neighborhood--the Monte Vista area behind the Cupertino Post Office--for emergency preparedness.

Jocius "was so helpful. She not only instructed us before the (disaster) drill but with the drill. After the drill she gave a good debriefing. She'd say, 'You know what? Things may not go as well as you thought, but you know where you need to improve, and you are so much ahead than you were before,'" Capener says. "She's a natural teacher."

Even though the neighborhood hasn't had a drill in several years, "people know our house is headquarters," Capener says.

Jocius' neighborhood organizing in Cupertino earned national recognition from FEMA.

In 1993 she became the emergency coordinator for San Mateo. She worked in the fire department and reported to the fire chief.

While working in San Mateo from 1993 to 2004, "the whole landscape of emergency preparedness changed," Jocius says.

During the Oakland hills fire, firefighters discovered that the fire couplers on the Oakland fire hydrants didn't fit other responder trucks. As a result of this and other inconsistencies, California passed a law called Standardized Emergency Management System--SEMS. Congress passed a similar law, National Incident Management Systems--NIMS. This requires a standardization of a plan with the same language, the same format. All government agencies must follow this, or they will not be eligible for federal reimbursement following a disaster.

Jocius had just retired when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and other parts of the South. She had no role in the emergency management or relief work. "You don't auto-respond," she says. "You wait until you're called to respond.

"I worried about the invisible, vulnerable people, the elderly, the children. This is my passion in life. The vulnerable--they need to be brought into the system. These people need to be identified and preplanned for and taken care of."

Jocius may be retired from her day job, but her passion to prepare continues. To help children and schools with disaster preparedness, Jocius has designed a training tool, a set of cards called Dealing with Disaster. "It's an entire emergency plan in a box," Jocius says. You can deal out the cards to teachers and parents around a table. They role-play the character and action on their card. In the case of an actual emergency, adults wear a card in a plastic holder around their neck and know at an instant from the instructions on the card the role and job each has.

The cards include 42 scenarios of disaster, from an active shooter to a blizzard, a flood, a tornado and West Nile virus.

"There's nothing out there like this in the world," she says. This all came "because I wanted my kids to be safe." Jocius is a consultant to school districts. More information about her cards is on her Website, www.dealingwithdisasters.com.

Be prepared

Jocius believes everyone needs a 72-hour emergency kit. People need to be able to be on their own for the first 72 hours following a disaster. Since Katrina, some planners advocate a 96-hour kit.

Jocius says she walks the talk. She heads out to her fire-engine red Ford Explorer and pops open the back. She pulls out her 72-hour kit, one of her many kits. She keeps one in her car, one in their camper trailer and enough supplies in her house for months.

She pulls out packages of "heater meals," packaged food that warms itself. She has water, plastic gloves, first aid supplies plus light sticks that don't need batteries or matches.

In her back yard, she keeps longer-term emergency supplies in two storage sheds. Here she has barrels of water--three large blue plastic barrels and three brown wooden pickle barrels. She bought the wooden barrels off a dock in San Francisco, brought them home and hosed them down.

Jocius also has stacks of orange traffic cones. She buys extra food. "When I shop, I double-can. Tuna? I buy two. It's part of my food stock, my paper stock."

The key is water, Jocius says.

"You need one gallon per person per day--this is just for drinking. You can store water in empty milk containers. Just add three drops of Clorox--NOT lemon-flavored. Put the top back on. Water does not go bad. It's the container that fails--it cracks, gets brittle. Even if water grows moss--purify it, using iodine tablets from a camping-supplies store."

Canned food is good. Be sure to include a can opener. Tuna or pork and beans work, and you can eat them right out of a can.

Remember special-needs items: Diapers, formulas and extra water for kids. For adults, remember medicines, mobility aids and batteries for hearing aids.

For medical supplies: bandages, antiseptics, pain medicines, a basic first-aid kit. Make up your own or go to Costco. The American Red Cross has a list that can be downloaded.

Jocius is considered a "pioneer of community emergency response," Hovey says. "She was organizing neighborhoods before it became popular. She has a real passion for emergency preparedness."

The bottom line: "People are very complacent," Jocius says. "People think the government will help when a disaster strikes, but that's not the case. You are on your own. You see that in New Orleans. Government can't do everything."

For more information:

The next 18-hour CERT course begins Sept. 7.The class is free to Cupertino residents, $35 fee for non-residents. A three-hour Personal Emergency Preparedness Workshop is offered once a month. The next class is 6:30-9:30 p.m., March 22, at space 2156 in Vallco. For more information, call 408.777.3335 or visit Cupertino.org/emergency.