This is Why We Prep

Every single time, the warning comes early. Every single time, most people ignore it. And every single time, the same images show up on the news a few days later: empty shelves, gridlocked highways, and people who swear they had no idea it would be this bad.

This isn’t a one-storm problem. It’s not something that happened once, to one city, a long time ago. Look back at the last twenty years and you’ll find the same story playing out again and again, in different states, with different names, and the same ending: people who waited, and paid for it.

This is why we prep.

A Twenty-Year Pattern of “We Had No Idea”

Hurricane Katrina — 2005. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation the day before landfall. An estimated 1.2 million people got out. Tens of thousands of others didn’t, or couldn’t — many of them poor residents with no car and nowhere to go. They ended up packed into the Superdome and the convention center, where food and water ran out fast in 90-degree heat. More than fifty levees failed. Eighty percent of the city went underwater. By the time it was over, nearly 1,400 people were dead and it stands as the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. It took three days for the National Guard to arrive in force. Three days, while people sat on rooftops waiting for a rescue that wasn’t coming fast enough.

The man running FEMA at the time, Michael Brown, had run horse-show associations before this job. Days into the crisis, with people still stranded on rooftops and dying in the Superdome, President Bush told him on camera, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Brown was pulled off the response within the week and resigned soon after. When he testified to Congress, he spent most of it blaming Louisiana’s governor and New Orleans’ mayor instead of his own agency. Nobody in that chain took the failure seriously enough to fix it before the warning signs were already on the news.

Hurricane Sandy — 2012. The “Superstorm” battered the East Coast after a full week of warnings — and most people still treated a coming hurricane like an inconvenience instead of a threat. Grocery shelves across the Northeast were stripped bare 24 to 48 hours before landfall. Millions lost power, some for weeks. In the aftermath, entire neighborhoods were left without heat, water, or supplies, with no real timeline on when things would return to normal — and thousands of people who’d had nearly a week’s notice were still asking, in real time on social media, whether they should “probably hit the grocery store.”

On Long Island, more than a million customers lost power and some waited over two weeks to get it back. The utility responsible, LIPA, had been warned about exactly this after Hurricane Irene the year before and hadn’t fixed its system or its customer communications. Hundreds of residents eventually showed up to protest outside LIPA’s offices. New York’s governor at the time called the response “unacceptable” and the state attorney general issued subpoenas to both LIPA and Con Edison over their storm preparation. LIPA’s chief operating officer resigned by the end of the year. The warning about the storm had been accurate for a week. The warning about the utility’s readiness had been sitting unaddressed for over a year.

Winter Storm Uri / the Texas grid collapse — 2021. This one didn’t even need a coastline. A multi-day arctic blast knocked out roughly 40 percent of the state’s power generation capacity in a matter of hours. At the peak, more than 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses had no power — in freezing temperatures, for days. Nearly half the state lost water service as pipes froze and treatment plants went offline, triggering boil-water notices for around 12 million people. Officials eventually linked at least 246 deaths to the storm, most from hypothermia. Texas’ grid operator later admitted it came within four minutes and thirty-seven seconds of a total statewide blackout that could have taken weeks to fix. This wasn’t a hurricane zone getting hit by a hurricane. This was a modern, wealthy state’s infrastructure failing in real time because almost nobody — utilities included — had prepared for the cold to actually arrive.

The fallout named names. ERCOT’s CEO, Bill Magness, was making over $800,000 a year and was fired within two weeks of the blackouts. Seven ERCOT board members resigned, most of them within days, and reporters noted that nearly all of them didn’t even live in Texas. The head of the state’s Public Utility Commission, DeAnn Walker, resigned the same week after admitting under questioning that she hadn’t fully understood her own agency’s authority over the grid. A third commissioner was forced out weeks later after a leaked recording caught him telling out-of-state investors he was working to protect their profits from the very price spikes that buried Texans in surprise electric bills. The grid had nearly failed completely — and the people in charge of preventing that were, by their own later admissions, not ready for it either.

The Maui wildfires — 2023. Red flag fire warnings were issued before the blaze even started. When it did, it moved through Lahaina so fast that survivors described having only minutes to run. Hawaii’s outdoor warning sirens — the same system residents had been trained for decades to listen for — never sounded. Power and cell service went down across the fire zone before alerts could reach many of the people who needed them. More than 100 people died, thousands of structures burned, and entire blocks of a 150-year-old town were gone in a single night. Survivors said the smoke was the first warning some of them got.

Maui’s emergency management administrator, Herman Andaya, was asked at a press conference whether he regretted the decision not to sound the sirens. “I do not,” he said. He defended it by saying the sirens were mainly for tsunamis and that sounding them might have sent people fleeing toward the fire instead of away from it. He resigned less than two weeks later, citing health reasons, after records surfaced showing he had downplayed the siren system’s usefulness for years before the fire that killed his own neighbors.

Four different disasters. Four different decades within this one. Four entirely different parts of the country. And the same failure point every time, twice over: the public didn’t act on a warning that turned out to be accurate, and the people whose actual job it was to be ready — emergency directors, grid operators, utility executives, agency heads — weren’t either. Most of them kept their jobs through the warning. Almost none of them kept their jobs through the aftermath.

An Epidemic of Unprepared People

Scroll through the footage from any of these events and you’ll see the same thing. People filming bare shelves like it’s a shocking discovery. People saying they “should probably” stock up — hours, sometimes minutes, before it’s too late to matter. People who had a week of notice and used six days of it to do nothing.

By the time you’re standing in a grocery store fighting strangers over the last case of water, it’s already too late. You’re not prepping anymore. You’re panicking. And panic isn’t a plan — it’s what happens when you never had one.

None of this is new information, either. After Katrina, after Sandy, after every winter storm and wildfire and grid failure in between, the after-action reports say the same thing: warnings were issued, warnings were accurate, and most of the damage came from people and systems that weren’t ready to act on them. Resignations and firings happen after the fact. They don’t refund the two weeks LIPA customers spent without power, and they don’t bring back the people who died waiting for a National Guard convoy or a siren that never sounded. Accountability is a press conference. Preparedness is the thing that actually keeps your family fed, warm, and alive while everyone above you figures out who to blame. The storms get new names. The lesson doesn’t change.

Preparedness — It’s Actually Pretty Simple

Without overcomplicating it, preparedness is something almost anyone can do. How far you take it is up to you. But at the very least, every person should take the following steps to put themselves on the right side of that pattern.

• THE BASICS: Have at least two weeks’ worth of food, water, and emergency supplies on hand at all times. That means stocking up now, long before any danger is forecast — not after the first watch or warning goes up, when shelves are already being stripped.
• Evacuation Planning: Have an evacuation plan, and start putting it into motion the moment it looks like you could be affected. If the disaster misses you, chalk it up as a mini vacation. If it hits and you didn’t leave, you might be chalking it up as something a lot more permanent. The choice is yours — but it has to be made before the roads are gridlocked.
• Emergency Go Bag: Keep a bug-out bag filled with everything you and your family need to survive a disaster, and have it ready to grab at a moment’s notice. Lahaina residents didn’t get hours. Some got minutes.
• PREPARE NOW: Take preparedness seriously, starting today, not the day a storm gets a name. Despite the mainstream media’s attempts to make preppers look like a bunch of whackos, the moment something like this happens, those “whackos” are usually the first people their unprepared friends and family call for help. Stop caring about what others think, and start caring about the health and safety of your own family.

The names of the storms will keep changing. The pattern won’t — not until enough people stop waiting for the warning to feel real before they act on it.