PREPPING
Anyone can do it,
everyone should do it.
I started prepping after going through Hurricane Sandy in New York. I distinctly remember me and my roommate at the time at a warehouse liquor store filling one of those short, two-level grocery carts full of booze in advance of the storm and then at the last minute being like, “hey, should we maybe add some water?”
Then I was in a different store and they were out of candles and I remember a mother looking for some with her toddler in tow, and feeling worried for them.
Later, as the storm was closing in, I was in my apartment and on the phone with a friend of mine and she said, “you know you can pour water in the bowl of a toilet to force flush it if you need to,” which I had not known.
I think that whole situation begat my interest in the practice of prepping.
The mentality of prepping, for me, stems from anxiety.
I have anxiety. Prepping helps me alleviate some of it. If I am unable to prevent myself from imagining the worst case scenario, I find it helpful to at least additionally imagine how I would address it, and plan accordingly.
Of course, a person can go too far with this, but if you take stock of your living situation, think about the most likely disasters for you, talk them through with your family or friends or whoever else will be affected with you, form even a nominal plan and then take even a few steps to enact that plan, you’ll be ahead of the game.
It actually is like a game, or it can be.
The professional field of emergency management has a lot of exercises that play like games. Their full scale exercises can even have actors with fake blood and everything!
My dream emergency management job would be to write those. I never got to work in the field because I got my degree during lockdown and now have small children I need to stay home with, but maybe someday.
In the meantime, aside from all the background knowledge and theory of prepping I learned from that program, I got the idea of a TTX. A TTX is a tabletop exercise (TableTop eXercise) where you basically sit around a table with all the players in your disaster scenario game and talk through what would happen at each step and who would do what, when, where, why, and how.
I ran a hurricane evacuation TTX with my husband several years ago that was enormously valuable for us. It showed us our respective assumptions and how they differed, a lot of problems we would not have thought of beforehand, and, among other things, led to the generation of what-to-take lists that we broke out into timeframes, i.e., one minute’s notice, three hours’ notice, one day’s notice, etc.
And we used all of that information when we eventually did have to evacuate for a hurricane, and it saved us a lot of time and stress.
Also our go bags were already packed. You should always have a go bag packed, just in case.
One important thing I want to point out about PREPPER is that shit hits the fan there for dramatic purposes. In the sequel SURVIVALIST, things go from bad to worse also for dramatic purposes and not because this is necessarily what will happen in real life. In real life, in my experience, people are actually their best selves when disaster strikes. They don’t turn on each other, they help each other until other help comes.
The best prepping anyone can do is prepare to survive until that other help comes, and work to build a society where we can trust that it will.
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Make A Plan
Learn how to prepare your family for emergencies like disasters. Get step-by-step instructions on creating a plan that covers communication, evacuation, and sheltering.
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Build A Kit
Learn how to prepare a disaster supplies kit for your family in case of an emergency. The kit should have enough supplies to last for several days on your own.