Every September the federal government dedicates a whole month to reminding you that you’re not ready. That’s what National Preparedness Month actually is. FEMA and Ready.gov didn’t invent it because Americans are prepared. They invented it because we’re not, and their own numbers prove it.
FEMA’s household survey puts the share of Americans who’ve taken even three basic preparedness steps at somewhere around half. Half. An earlier survey found fewer than one in two households had ever sat down and made an emergency plan. So the government set aside thirty days a year to nag the other half into buying a flashlight.
Here’s the thing though. A reminder is still a reminder, and most people need one. So we’ll take it. If National Preparedness Month is the kick in the pants that gets you moving, good. Just don’t confuse the government’s standard for readiness with actual readiness, because those are two very different animals.
Where the Whole Thing Came From
National Preparedness Month traces back to September 11, 2001. In the years after the attacks, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security launched the Ready campaign and started marking September as the month to get your house in order. It’s been running since the mid-2000s.
The government’s pitch boils down to four moves: know your risk, make a plan, build a kit, and get involved. That’s not bad advice. It’s just aimed at somebody who owns zero batteries and has never once thought about where their water comes from. If that’s you, start there and don’t feel bad about it. Everybody starts somewhere.
But if you’ve been at this a while, September is a good excuse to pressure-test what you’ve already got instead of admiring it.
Know Your Risk (For Real, Not the Brochure Version)
Ready.gov wants you to look up what disasters happen in your area. Fine. But do it honestly.
If you’re on the Gulf or the Atlantic coast, it’s hurricanes, and the aftermath is the part that kills people, not the wind. If you’re in Texas, you learned in February 2021 that the grid can drop in a cold snap and take the water with it. If you’re in the mountain West, it’s wildfire and it moves faster than you think. Tornado alley knows what it is. And everybody, everywhere, is downstream of a power grid that DHS’s own people have warned could go down for months, not the two weeks the public guidance likes to quote.
Knowing your risk isn’t reading a list. It’s answering one question: what’s the most likely thing that puts my family in the dark for a week, and have I actually planned for that specific thing? Not a generic disaster. That one.
Make a Plan (The Part Everybody Skips)
This is the free one, and it’s the one people blow off because it’s not fun and there’s nothing to buy.
A plan means your family knows what to do when you’re not there to tell them. Where do you meet if the house is gone? Who’s the out-of-state contact everybody calls when the local lines are jammed? Who grabs the kids from school, and does the school know that person by name? What happens if it goes down while half of you are at work forty minutes away?
Write it down. Put a copy in each vehicle and each backpack. Your phone is not a plan. Your phone is a brick about four hours after the cell towers lose their backup power, and knowing where to get real information when the normal channels die is half the battle in the first 48 hours.
The plan costs nothing and it’s the single most-skipped step every single year. Do it this September and you’re already ahead of most of the country.
Build a Kit (And Ignore the Government’s Numbers)
Now the fun part. Gear.
Ready.gov says build a kit for 72 hours. Some FEMA material stretches to two weeks. Here’s my honest opinion: 72 hours is a joke and two weeks is a floor, not a goal.
Puerto Rico went 328 days without full power after Maria. Asheville spent 53 days hauling drinking water in buckets after Helene, in a modern American city with a reservoir. Your three-day kit runs out on hour 73 of a problem that lasts a month. So build past the government minimum.
Water first, because it kills you first. Store more than you think is reasonable, then store more. Know how to purify what you find when the stored stuff runs out, carry a filter that handles the nasty stuff, and read up on long-term water storage so you’re not drinking out of a garden hose in week three.
Food that actually keeps. Not a hobby garden you plant after the sirens. Real long-term storage food, packed right so it lasts 25 years instead of rotting in your basement, plus 56 things you can grab at a normal grocery store before you ever set foot in a prepper shop. And if you want to eat that food, you need a way to cook it without the grid.
Power, done safely. This is where people die. Carbon monoxide from a generator run too close to the house kills roughly 85 to 100 Americans a year in normal times, and the number spikes after every storm. If you go with a gas generator, it lives twenty feet from the house with the exhaust pointed away, no exceptions, and you put a battery-powered CO alarm on every floor. Better yet, look at solar and battery setups that don’t need fuel you can’t buy and don’t announce your address to the whole street. You can build a real off-grid solar rig for under a grand if you’re smart about it.
Light and fire. A tactical flashlight that does more than one job and a lighter that actually works wet and windy. Cheap insurance.
The stuff nobody puts on the list. Cash in small bills, because card readers need power. A trauma kit, not a box of Band-Aids. A 90-day fill on any prescription somebody in the house can’t live without. A full tank of gas at home, because the pumps are electric too.
If you want the full checklist to work off of, we keep a natural disaster preparedness checklist that lays it all out.
Get Involved (Their Word for It, Anyway)
Here’s where OFFGRID and the government actually agree, even if we mean slightly different things.
Ready.gov wants you to take a first-aid class and join a Community Emergency Response Team. Both are genuinely worth doing. First aid especially, because in an aftermath there’s no ER, or there’s one with a four-hour wait and no power.
But “get involved” also means the thing the feds won’t say out loud: know your neighbors before you need them. A prepper alone in a dark house is a target. Four houses on a street that know each other’s names, have each other’s numbers, and can tell a neighbor from a stranger is a problem nobody wants to solve. You don’t have to like them. You have to know them.
It also means getting reps in while the grid’s still up. Reading about this stuff isn’t the same as doing it. Go camping. Cook a meal on your backup stove in the backyard. Filter water from a creek. Run the generator. Find out what doesn’t work now, in September, with a Home Depot ten minutes away, instead of on day three of the real thing. And spend some of this month with a good survival book, because knowledge weighs nothing and can’t be confiscated.
Going Beyond…
National Preparedness Month is a government program, and you know how we feel about relying on the government. Don’t wait for FEMA to save you, don’t trust that help arrives on schedule, and don’t take the 72-hour kit as gospel.
But the calendar reminder itself? Use it. Most people put this off forever because there’s no deadline. September is your deadline. Pick one thing off this list you haven’t done, and do it before the month is out. Then pick the next one in October, because the whole point is that real preparedness doesn’t stop when the government’s awareness month ends.
The people who ride out the bad weeks aren’t the ones who bought a kit during a sale in September. They’re the ones who kept going after the reminder stopped. Ask yourself if you’d survive your own SHTF moment starting today, because that’s the only version of this that counts.
The government gave you a month. What you do with it is the actual test.
Start Here:
- The Aftermath: Preparing for Post Disaster Problems
- SHTF Plan: Are You Ready to Survive Your Own SHTF Moment?
- Natural Disasters: Emergency Preparedness Checklist
- Best Emergency Food: The Top Survival Food Supplies
Get the Books:
