This page is about preparing for a disaster or a crisis scenario. It is not meant to spiral anyone into doom and gloom, but rather the opposite. This section is meant to offer help and to provide clarity to anyone who wants to figure out how they can be a bit more self sufficient and better prepared for challenging situations.

There are A LOT of other resources out there on the Internet…forums, government sites, community groups, etc. I encourage everyone to seek out all the information sources that they need to and to cross reference info until they are personally satisfied that they are prepared.

When I refer to a crisis situation I am referring to any prolonged situation that disrupts, or makes impossible/impractical, your normal day-to-day life. This could be a wide spread power outage, local water contamination, natural disasters or a widespread biological outbreak. While I will use a scenario to help frame a discussion, the most important take-away here is to be flexible and prepared to adapt to any scenario. I hope that every becomes more capable of seeing a crisis coming, evaluating how it will impact, quickly assess what their capabilities are and then to have more confidence that they can deal with things.

At the time of this writing, the global Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has griped everyone’s attention. It has shutdown business, canceled all manner of events, curtailed regular life, cause panic buying and hoarding. The media, as it is prone to do now, has been relentless in its coverage. Governments at all levels are working hard behind the scenes and dramatic changes are announced with little forewarning to its populace. Unlike many other crisis scenarios, this pandemic is not localized. It is not a damaging hurricane, it isn’t a large area power outage.

What can I do:

  1. Don’t panic - it doesn’t help and panicking often leads to rash decisions that you would not otherwise make and can lead to dangerous situations.

  2. Assess what you have prepared - doing this will help give you comfort and ground you with a baseline to go forward.

  3. Take all information sources with a grain of salt - listen, read, collaborate…but really dig for the meaning of the message and don’t exhaust yourself by being immersed in the same dramatic info endlessly.

  4. Work on preparing for the situation - deal with the situation at hand. Prioritize your safety and those around you. Prioritize self sufficiency and independence. Think of what’s next…and reassess.

Great…so how do I do that:

  1. Develop a strong, trustworthy community around you that can be there for each other for support, guidance and collaboration.

  2. Preps always fall back to the basics - Safety - shelter/food/water. Those are further broken down (e.g. you need to be dry and warm enough in your shelter, so you need to look beyond holding a newspaper over your head) and we’ll get into more of a breakdown further on.

  3. Internet, news sites, good old fashioned AM/FM radio and your community will be your information sources. You need to seek these out vs. waiting for the news to trickle down to you sometime later on.

  4. Dealing with a crisis is highly situation dependent…and the take away is that you will need to go through the sometimes uncomfortable exercise of working through scenarios in advance. But doing so is self reinforcing, you will gain confidence and you will be able to adapt to whatever specific situation does come up faster and more capably.

Ok…let’s get to the specifics:

  • Community

  • Preps

  • Info

  • Dealing with a crisis