My Wife Thinks I'm Crazy

OK, maybe not exactly crazy, but she certainly thinks I'm paranoid. I'm not going to get into a prolong discussion about my rationale, but suffice to say that I'm increasingly concerned about a number of trends in our society in general, but I'm of the opinion that not being prepared for emergency situations in general is irresponsible. Even FEMA has very specific recommendations for citizen preparedness for emergencies. What emergencies?

Well, let's start with this...... about a month ago, Dallas suffered an EF3 tornado that was on the ground for 32 minutes. That section of town will have power out for a few days at least. Not that many years ago, our little suburb had an actual tornado strike that was less than a mile from my school. 

You don't have to suffer this kind of catastrophic damage to have problems. What if you're one of the houses down the street where the electricity and maybe even gas is going to be out for several days, if not weeks? What's your answer to that? You could do it the simple (also expensive) way by getting a hotel room......, but for how long, what about looters......., yes; there was definitely problems with that in the effected areas. So, what are the specific items that any citizen has the responsibility (and right) to answer?

So, at the very least, you have a "defend" situation as related to an emergency. Of course, that's not even discuss the famous/infamous "7 minutes" (average time for police to respond in a metropolitan area) that folks are on the hook to defend themselves if there's an issue with an intruder. And these are the least "far fetched" scenarios out there. The more remote possibilities range from frisky North Koreans executing an EMP attack, or a Cyber-attack bringing the grid to it's knees to the Trump vs. China situation getting completely out-of-hand!

At the end of the day, there are any number of reasons to be prepared for an emergency. So, let's take a look at the elements that have to be accounted for in that area. Above are the 3 basic elements, but let's look more deeply within the concept and discuss them. I have them divided up into modules and define them:

• Module A (Armament): Self-explanatory need to be able to defend yourself and your family whether that's for the "7 minute" gap, or more to the point; what if law enforcement isn't coming?
• Module B (Basic Needs): Literally meaning the things that we need to help us survive on a daily basis (with the exception of food which is it's own separate category). This would include clothing, tech to help us live, such as tools.
• Module C (Communications): This if an often overlooked area that's incredibly important. The assumption is that routine communications systems (cell and landlines) will go down in short order, so how do we maintain comms? These are necessary for not only any access to outside information, but also situational/tactical communications.
• Module D (Medical): If the 24hr pharmacy isn't going to refill your meds any time soon and the you can't get through on 911..... then what?
• Module E (Energy): In any even of an emergency event, one of the first things that we'll lose is power delivery. Look at your life: how will you live for the next week or so, if electricity is down for more than a few hours.
• Module F (Food): How are you going to survive when the stores run out of stock? There'll be no Amazon deliveries in a natural disaster. How does your family survive, even if it's only for a few day, or a week? 

These modules aren't in order. I simply used the letters conveniently to represent the major groups of items needed to help anyone to survive after a major catastrophy. The fact is that they are all necessary and work as a system. 

Here's the issue: we're not buddies with Bill Gates, and not going to just contact people to have it done. So, we'll have to get ourselves ready in the old fashion way. Meaning; do what we can, when we can, when we can afford it. Over the course of the next few weeks (hopefully), or months (more probably), I'm going to discuss the necessary "preps" to be able to feel secure if any number of "unforeseen" disaster scenarios occurs. 

 

This isn't the goal. I have what I feel to be a well-grounded faith that nothing serious will occur over the course of the rest of my life, but that being said, I'm going to say that there's not going to be some possibility that one of a number of issues happening. ........ That'd be stupid and irresponsible.