Kate Hawkesby: After Kaikoura, Christchurch earthquakes why are we so slack at planning for a disaster?

It wasn't until one of the kids brought a piece of homework home from school which asked them to document the safety and evacuation procedures our family had established in the event of a natural disaster, that I realised we didn't have any.

"What's our escape plan?" she asked nonchalantly.

"Huh?" I replied.

"Like do we go out a window or what? And where's our first aid kit, and how many days worth of water do we have to survive?" the questions continued.

I raise this because it appears our preparedness for natural disasters is woeful. Not just our household, but in one in five Kiwi homes.

It's surprising I guess that having lived through the brutality of the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes, that we still appear lax.

Civil Defence's latest preparedness survey found that a third of us had emergency supplies at home, but a quarter of us claimed to not know enough about how to prepare. One in five of us never thought we'd experience a natural disaster.

So researchers are now looking at creative new ways to help turn these numbers around, given the old traditional ways clearly haven't worked. One of the key planks to effecting change is to make people care of course. To change attitudes around preparedness.

Researchers found that people who felt more closely attached to their homes were more likely to take steps to prepare for disasters. Well I like my home, I'm attached to it, but I still haven't stored days worth of water.

Which is slack to say the least, given as a country we are at risk of natural hazard events occurring. It's hoped the new approach to research on how to make us more prepared might wake people like me up a bit.

There are of course apps and digital projects around disaster awareness. Apps that can guide you through what to do, how to take action - but how useful a smartphone app is at the time of an actual crisis remains to be seen.

Do we even have the power to keep our tenuous smartphone battery alive? Not to mention, our ability to process information and find details on smartphones when under stress, is likely to be compromised at the very least.

So researchers will look at that too apparently. The good news here is that science is taking the lead. Funded by the government, 11 national science challenges, drawing together hundreds of collaborating scientists, will hopefully tap into ways of waking us up on the disaster front.

I know that after the homework project confronted a lack of preparedness at our place, I was shamed into sorting a spare first aid kit and a survival pack - still need to get that water stored though.

It's a good reminder that we can't afford to be too complacent - a lesson many of our friends in Christchurch and Kaikoura know all too well.