What are YOU preparing for?

 

What?

I've asked this question dozens of times, and had people give dozens of answers, but it is a critical question that people new to preparedness must ask themselves before even buying their first can of food. It's also a question people experienced in preparedness should ask themselves at least two to three times a year; What ARE you preparing for? The answer to that question will drive nearly every other decision and choice within your preparedness plan. Are you preparing for the next winter storm? The next tornado or hurricane? Does the thought of a major financial collapse, depression, or recession affecting the United States economy keep you up at night? Do you have fears or nightmares surrounding an asteroid strike or do you just want to avoid the annoyance caused by an impending ice storm?

How Long?

Whatever your target event is will drive many factors based on the impact of that event. As an example, it's anticipated that a nuclear war will trigger a global nuclear (particulate) winter that can last upwards of 25 years. As such a solid bunker with 25 years worth of supplies is the expected level of preparedness. Another example would be a blizzard in severe-winter weather prone areas. In most blizzard type of events you rarely would need more than two weeks worth of supplies to get you through the disruption.

Avoid Getting Overwhelmed or Burned Out

For most new preppers especially, time-frame and what that means can be extremely overwhelming. It can lead to people interested in preparedness to toss their arms up and walk away from the activities. I always provide the following advice to stave this off; perform general preparedness for a time frame of two weeks, then go from there. If you can successfully achieve a reliable level of preparedness with near 100% off grid independence for two weeks you're off to a great start. At that point is when you want to start to specialize your preparedness condition, but having a good generalized set of preparations is dramatically beneficial, too. You never know what disaster will actually befall you. Generalization, at least to start, keeps your options open. Specialization can occur after that. 

Examples

Say you want to prepare for the "biggie", nuclear war (I love the nuclear war example because it's the most extreme conditional event on so many levels). From your two-week preparedness baseline you will want to add radiological monitoring equipment, iodine tablets, and treatment for burns to your preparedness supplies. You'll also want to dramatically increase your food, water and water purification methods, and shelter plan. 

A different scenario you may plan for after your two week baseline is set may be tornado. Again shelter would become critical, but for a much shorter period of time (no 25 year nuclear winter to live through), but excavation gear such as shovels, axes, and a chain saw, could be added to your preparations. Rarely would more than two weeks worth of baseline prepping supplies be needed to recover from a tornado, but that shelter will become invaluable, then, as would a solid weather radio and power plan. 

In Summary

The key is to define, level-set, plan, and specialize. Define what drives your desire to prepare, set a base-line level of preparations, plan for the more specified event, then expand and specialize your preparations. In my strong-but-humble opinion the base-line or level set preparedness is key to moving forward. It provides a habit-forming expectation of what level of preparedness will be required from a general perspective. This is crucial in not becoming too specialized. Nothing would be more embarrassing than preparing 100% for a financial collapse of the U.S. and having a tornado sweep in and blow all those preps away.  It's best to focus more broadly then narrow down in these cases.

Stay safe.