Preparedness Planning: Planning to Survive Disasters and Threats
When it comes to preparedness, one of the most important things you can do is to put together a plan of action. If things go bad, having a plan of action can help increase your chances of surviving the chaos.
- Will you stay or will you go? Start thinking about what type of disasters would cause you to evacuate your home, and what situations would call for hunkering down and sheltering in place.
- Put together an Evacuation plan: If you do need to leave, you need to have a plan in place. Bugging out without a plan or a place to go is not going to end well.
- Have a Plan B: Having a preparedness plan is great, but during a crisis, those plans can quickly change. Because of the unpredictable nature of disasters, you need to have a backup plan for when things start to spiral out of control.
- Your Plan needs to include the immediate steps you’ll take once disaster hits: When planning for disasters people often put too much emphasis on gear and supplies. Having Survival Gear is great, but it isn’t the whole picture; you have to have a plan that includes what steps you’ll take once the threat hits.
- Get Home Planning: When planning for disasters, one of the most overlooked areas is often what happens in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Even more problematic – especially if you’re not ready to deal with it – is what happens when you find yourself away from home when disaster strikes.
Preparing for the most Likely Disasters First
Many Survival books and websites often place too much emphasis on those rare, but frightening end-of-days types of disasters. While yes, some of those events could conceivably happen, it’s often the small-scale localized dangers that pose the largest threat to your safety.
This is one of the main reasons I wrote my book, The Ultimate Situational Survival Guide; people need to really understand what threats are out there, and then take steps to prepare for the chaos that could result from each of those threats.
- Five Real-life threats that people rarely prepare for: Remember prepping isn’t just about preparing for cataclysmic events; it’s about being prepared for those common everyday disasters that people often ignore.
- Prepare a Threat Assessment to find the most likely threats you’ll face: A threat assessment can help you get a better idea of what threats are out there, and then help you prepare for those threats.
- Put together a 3-6 month Cash Reserve: Being able to withstand financial shocks is one of the cornerstones of preparedness. Small shocks are much more likely than an end of the world scenarios; you should be preparing for the likely small shocks in your life before going full throttle with your prepping.
- 7 Very Real Threats Most People Aren’t Ready For: While I always advise people to do their own threat assessment, and look at what disasters are most likely to affect them based on their geographic location and lifestyle, there are some threats that most people either ignore or are completely unaware of.
- 70 Common Things That Go wrong During a Disaster: Just as important as knowing what the most likely threats are is knowing what will likely go wrong when those threats happen.
Stocking up on Gear & Supplies
I love survival gear as much as the next guy, but If you’ve skipped over the planning and the training phase you are doing yourself a huge disservice; you’re also putting everyone you care about in danger. That being said, gear does play a large role in survival and knowing what gear to buy and what supplies to stock up on is an important piece of the puzzle.
- 56 Long-Term Survival Foods and Essential Supplies: A list of the top food supplies and emergency items you can buy at an average grocery store.
- The Ultimate Guide for Building the Perfect Bug Out Bag: A guide for building your own personal bug out bag.
- Prepping 101 – Organize your Prepping Supplies: Organization is an important part of prepping; don’t overlook the need to have a good system of organization.
- Long-Term Ammo Storage: If you plan on storing ammunition for an extended period of time, you need to take environmental conditions like humidity into account.
- Top 101 pieces of survival gear that our Readers Carry: Some of our readers favorite survival items; this should give you a good idea of what people stockpile.
- The 15 Commandments of Food Storage: Some good advice on starting your emergency food stockpile.
- Make sure you have a Good Get Home Bag: Don’t overlook the importance of a good get home bag.
Mental Preparations: You need to Develop a Survival Mindset
Often when you read about survival, you usually read about things like gear, survival skills, and emergency planning; while those things are extremely important, and will make surviving a lot easier, there’s one thing that’s often overlooked that really is the key to survival: Mental Preparedness.
- Surviving Traumatic Events starts with developing the Right Mindset: The will to survive is probably the single most important aspect of surviving a traumatic event.
- Disaster Related PTSD: How to Recover From Disasters and Traumatic Events: Disasters are traumatic events that can have severe mental and physical health consequences, developing the proper coping skills and strategies can help get you through even the toughest situations.
- Prepping without giving into Fear: While aspects of fear can be helpful during certain situations, if you don’t learn how to how to properly control it, it can be a debilitating killer.
Shoot for the Goal of Total Self-Sufficiency
Thanks to modern technology and our consumer culture, what was once common knowledge in this country has largely faded away; replaced by a dependence on everything and everybody but ourselves. Sadly, we now live in a world where most people can’t make it an hour without incessantly checking their iPhone; I won’t even mention how long these same people would last out during a disaster that caused the grid to go down.
When it comes to preparedness, your end goal should be 100% self-sufficiency. It really is the only way you can truly be prepared for everything that the future has in store. While it’s not going to be easy, especially in this interdependent age of technology, there are things you can do to help ease into the lifestyle.
- 19 Baby Steps Toward a Self Sufficient Lifestyle: The good news is that there are lots of choices and the journey toward self-sufficiency does not have to be done in a day, a month, a year or even a decade.
- 32 Self-Reliant Resources: Preparedness Skills that Everyone Should Know
- Important Self-Reliant Skill: Learning how to cook from scratch – If you’re serious about preparedness, and you’re in the process of getting started with food storage, learning how to cook from scratch is something you cannot afford to ignore. In order to successfully build a stockpile of emergency food, you’re going to need to learn how to cook, and you’re going to need to learn how to do it with basic ingredients.
- Urban Homesteading: How To Make a Square Foot Garden – A really simple square foot garden setup that will help move you towards the self-sufficient lifestyle – even if you live in an urban setting.
- Ten Reasons to Become Self-Sufficient and Ten Ways to Get There: We are now three to five generations removed from the rural backbone that strengthened America. Here are the top reasons for becoming self-sufficient, followed by ten things you can do to get there.
- Learn how to Fish& Hunt: If you haven’t started fishing, hunting, or learning how to procure your own food you need seriously think about learning at least one of these skills.
