After having lived through a couple of natural disasters, I think the most important preparation you can make is to get to know your neighbors. Exchange phone numbers, give them a key. Help them out, ask for favors. (Asking for small favors is a good trick to establish trust: ask for the proverbial cup of sugar to make them feel comfortable asking you for favors. And then when they ask, be reliable).
The other is to make sure you have a good insurance company. Go to a neighborhood that has experienced a tornado or similar. Ask around -- people will know which insurance companies were helpful and which were penny pinching obstructionists.
Is there a plausible scenario where having 2 weeks of water does anything more than having a weeks worth? I feel like after a week you're either getting evacuated, the government is delivering supplies, or large parts of the country are not functioning.
General guidelines to have a decent pantry, someway to cook things, some spare water, a way to heat your home if you're in a place that has winter, a source of emergency lighting:
A) Not really that much fun (as evidenced by how shitty life gets for pretty much everyone in "The Walking Dead"). ;)
B) In my mind "The Zombie Apocalypse" has always just been an amusing way to generically refer to whatever future real "apocalypse" might happen to occur (eg; broken water main, ice storm, etc).
The most important preparation: be friendly enough with your neighbors that you look out for each other. You can hate each other in general: so long as you won't allow looters in the neighborhood, and you can force yourself to get along enough to share/divide labor (in whatever way it turns out you need).
In the worst disasters preppers prepare for - odds are they die, so make sure your neighbors know what plans you have, if you die (or just you are out of town on vacation) your preparation can save someone else's life.
For the most part, looters are thieves of opportunity. They'll take the stuff that's easy to take and won't risk a confrontation.
It's like the parable of outrunning the bear: you don't have to be completely looter proof, you just have to be a harder target than the next block over. Most of the time that just means having a couple people per block patrolling with a camera to scare them off.
I barely am able to plan groceries for a few days to a week ahead, especially with two middle schoolers eating everything in sight. While I would agree with the sentiment (definitely something will disrupt heat/water/food access), I struggle with actually executing on doing anything other than having some real basics around. 30 days of spare food feels like such an enormous amount of space and material.
Mine is just a shelf of Chef Boyardee and Campbell's.
I eat one or two a week as regular lunches, to rotate stock. When there's some room at the empty end of the shelf, I shove everything down, and buy some new cans to stuff in at the intake end.
It takes no more time than going to the pantry for a can of soup regularly would. And saves time, because I'm _never_ out and scrambling to find another option. Whether I'm 8 cans down or 24, one trip to the store will replenish it regardless.
Don't overcomplicate it. Folks who blog about things tend to do so because they're proud they achieved something difficult, so you compare yourself to a difficult standard. Resist that.
This is the way. And I have no shame when I warm up a can of ravioli in the microwave at coworking.
Even though the campbell's exec declared it "poor food" the jazzy jambalaya has replaced our instant pot recipe. We buy two cans of it, add a package of microwaveable ready rice and have decent (although very carb and sodium heavy) dinner in ~3 minutes.
It also cooks up great in a small pot on a pocket rocket and tastes great right of the can as far as it being suitable for emergency food.
I feel similarly, but I did get some stuff in Feb 2020 when I could tell that COVID was going to be a huge deal. Camp stove, water storage containers, bulk bags of dry beans and rice, and several buckets of freeze dried food that have a shelf life of decades and could keep my family alive for at least a couple months. It's not really enough tbh, but it's something.
Did you get toilet paper? As I recall that was the main thing everybody was short of. (I'm lucky, we made our regular costco run about that time and got our regular 3 months supply of toilet paper and so didn't need more until supplies returned). The grocery stores all had plenty of fresh food (some things ran short, but there was always plenty)
So like a month of food and water? If the big electrical grid pop happens <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackou...>, we're looking at years, which no storage solution can accommodate. So while this is sensible for most outages, doesn't do much for this event, which becomes quite possible if (1) China moves on Taiwan and (2) USA intervenes on behalf of Taiwan. I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately
I suppose this could be true with the rest of CRINK since they are all capable cyber adversaries, but China is on another level in terms of capability and it's their best lever with little cost. I suppose they have to calculate whether the US would bring out the nukes in such a circumstance
> I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately
If they could do this, wouldn't they already have moved on Taiwan?
This is a sensible type of prepping. Prep for the things you will most likely face and some outliers within your geography. I myself could never understand the years worth of food types of folks. If things breakdown that much I don’t know much that food is going to matter.
Even if things do break down such that you need years of food people have the wrong things. You don't need gas for your generator, you need to learn how to live like 500 years ago - without all that. Have enough food to last until next spring, and enough seeds and farming knowledge (which you can get from a few books that you read after the disaster) that you can continue to live off of your garden.
As I said elsewhere, make sure you can share knowledge and work with other survivors. A community of people with various skills (even if you give them the book and they learn it) makes survival a lot easier. Maybe your garden fails, but if you have a few other people you work with you can support each other and everybody lives.
I'm in Switzerland and hadn't ever experienced a power outage in the 13 years I had been here but when Russia invaded Ukraine there was talk of intermittent rolling blackouts. They never happened but just in case I bought an ups for my home Ubuntu server and to my great surprise we had a blackout! There was a problem with a high-voltage power line coming from the mountains to my part of Zurich.
I happened to be in the cellar where I keep my server when it happened. The lights went out and I was in complete darkness other than the lights on the server and drives. I got my phone flashlight working and looked at the screen on the ups. It was working perfectly - the server was running and the amount of minutes remaining was dropping until there was five minutes left and my server initiated shutdown. Later that day when the power came back on the server booted back up.
> We have a strong preference for sheltering in place, so we do not have a go bag or anything like that. We'd shelter in place because that's where all our preps are!
I don't totally understand this because quite a lot of disasters or threats will mean you can't shelter in place? Even if it's not your main thing to plan for how can a threat model just rule out wildfires, massive flooding, a hurricane or so on.
He lives in Washington. His likely disasters are not ones that mean move. Maybe a wildfire - some parts of Washington get fires, but they don't get hurricanes, and most are not subject to flooding (though this depends on where you live, one block down the street might be a problem - if he lives on the top of the hill is plans should be those living near the bottom shelter at his house).
Plan for the disasters that are likely where you are. I have plans for a tornado - I shelter in my basement until it blows over, and then the next morning the police will help me get to a hotel (tornadoes are to sudden too evacuate in time, but small enough that the local hotels have extra room). I don't have plans for a hurricane because the closest I get to a hurricane is when the weather reports the minor rain we are seeing is what is left of a major hurricane a week ago.
Prepping should be local. Here in Scotland the things I would prioritize are snowstorms (once had food delivery to supermarkets delayed for several days) and high winds (friend was without power for six days). Here we don't get true hurricanes or tornadoes, and the high winds events have been shelter in place events.
Some places in the UK might have to start worrying more about wildfires. Flooding is definitely on the rise.
(UK flooding is nearly always "you can save a lot of expensive damage with careful sandbagging" rather than "entire building swept away", though)
I'm reminded of a book I read a few years ago, Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O'Connell, which discusses (among other things) the phenomenon of "prepper" culture.
Why? Water for flushing is nice for hygiene in the most common case of short outages. And there's very little storage annoyance - heck if you need a bucket for a project, you dump it out and fill it back up from the hose when done.
Drinking water requires more expensive containers, and some thinking around keeping it fresh (rotation & potentially some chemical additives like bleach).
Not really. Not being able to flush is annoying, but you can do that outside. There are some health risks but they are manageable (human waste carries pathogens). 3 days is a very long disaster: if things are that bad you need to start activating other plans anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if where he lives he can just go to a nearby stream and refill his flush water anytime he wants.
Water is critical to life and so you want to be sure civilization won't return before you risk drinking random water. That said, I'd keep a camping water treatment instead (there are lots of options) since they take up less space.
I used to be a prepper, but have decided that moving remote is the only thing I'm willing to do anymore. If the world's population really does drop 99% from something, the person that kills me will be me. Totally hoping something like that doesn't happen.
Every daylight savings time, I rotate my stored water. I empty out my containers, refilling them with, then add 7 drops of bleach per gallon.
* Edit * I've been asked before what the best survival book is. Honestly, it is One Second After by William R. Forstchen. It's probably the best description scenario that could occur.
It is not those regurgitated line drawings that everyone copies from Euell Gibbons, or rehashed rule of 3's survival books.
The old stuff can be used to water house plants or your garden. If you have advanced warning of an event (e.g., hurricane), you can also fill up a large reserve 'just in time':
You don’t. You have RO at the point of consumption. At any rate, it’s our approach, we store 150,000L in a cistern over the winter and use it through the summer.
Non-potable just goes through the usual barrels full of sand and biochar, and doesn’t need further treatment.
Hot water heaters don’t heat water enough to kill bacteria and also they’re absolutely disgusting inside unless you’re one of the rare 0.1% of people who drain it annually and replace the sacrificial anode when it needs replacing.
A major hurricane hit my community in the US not too long ago, hundreds dead, a tremendous amount of the community destroyed. We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink.
In those early days post storm, I had neighbors regularly knocking on my door to make sure I was OK and I had enough food and water to get through the day. Since we had no internet, everyone was outside talking to each other, walking around and checking in. And we had huge cookouts at the houses with gas stoves so we could cook the perishable stuff before it went bad. Curfew was strict and law enforcement was everywhere, armed National Guard protected the grocery stores from looting.
It was a traumatic experience in some ways. I knew people that lost everything, had friends pulling bodies out of the river, sharing stories I never thought I'd hear in my life. But the community came together, and never once did I think "man I really wish I got into prepper culture".
I personally think it's insane to believe that someone could survive a major event like that completely independent of the community. Humanity got to where it is today because of community, not in spite of it. And prepper culture ignores all of that through it's "can't depend on anyone" ethos. I personally find it really sad.
Absolutely reliably the best way to increase your chance of survival in a situation like this is to have good relations with your neighbours in a good community with high trust.
A large number of people working together will be much more likely to find solutions than a few isolated individuals. The isolated individuals may have disproportionately large survival resources, but probably not for long. If you are in the caring-is-sharing group you will have a much better chance than being in the me-me-bang-oh-shit group.
But there are a lot of people who fear community solidarity because it might lead to people asking questions about private jets and beach condos.
> We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink.
Amateur ("ham") radio can be handy. If you don't want to go to the effort to get a radio, a receive-only AM/FM crank/solar radio can be handy to get news.
After having lived through a couple of natural disasters, I think the most important preparation you can make is to get to know your neighbors. Exchange phone numbers, give them a key. Help them out, ask for favors. (Asking for small favors is a good trick to establish trust: ask for the proverbial cup of sugar to make them feel comfortable asking you for favors. And then when they ask, be reliable).
The other is to make sure you have a good insurance company. Go to a neighborhood that has experienced a tornado or similar. Ask around -- people will know which insurance companies were helpful and which were penny pinching obstructionists.
Is there a plausible scenario where having 2 weeks of water does anything more than having a weeks worth? I feel like after a week you're either getting evacuated, the government is delivering supplies, or large parts of the country are not functioning.
September is (US) National Preparedness Month:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Preparedness_Month
General guidelines to have a decent pantry, someway to cook things, some spare water, a way to heat your home if you're in a place that has winter, a source of emergency lighting:
* https://www.ready.gov
* https://getprepared.ca
Zombie apocalypses are a fun meme, but a broken city water main or an ice storm can be quite disruptive.
> Zombie apocalypses are a fun meme ...
A) Not really that much fun (as evidenced by how shitty life gets for pretty much everyone in "The Walking Dead"). ;)
B) In my mind "The Zombie Apocalypse" has always just been an amusing way to generically refer to whatever future real "apocalypse" might happen to occur (eg; broken water main, ice storm, etc).
The most important preparation: be friendly enough with your neighbors that you look out for each other. You can hate each other in general: so long as you won't allow looters in the neighborhood, and you can force yourself to get along enough to share/divide labor (in whatever way it turns out you need).
In the worst disasters preppers prepare for - odds are they die, so make sure your neighbors know what plans you have, if you die (or just you are out of town on vacation) your preparation can save someone else's life.
So my neighbours hate me, but somehow major disaster changes that?
> won't allow looters in the neighborhood
My neighbours will be the first one to "equally share" everything I have with random junkies.
> if you die ... your preparation can save someone else's life.
Yeah, my neighbours make sure I die, and my stash will save their life.
For the most part, looters are thieves of opportunity. They'll take the stuff that's easy to take and won't risk a confrontation.
It's like the parable of outrunning the bear: you don't have to be completely looter proof, you just have to be a harder target than the next block over. Most of the time that just means having a couple people per block patrolling with a camera to scare them off.
> So my neighbours hate me, but somehow major disaster changes that?
Yes. Shared adversity tends to unite, not divide.
> My neighbours will be the first one to "equally share" everything I have with random junkies.
I guarantee you they won't, just out of self-preservation. They'd rather have you than "random junkies" or a trashed house next door.
I barely am able to plan groceries for a few days to a week ahead, especially with two middle schoolers eating everything in sight. While I would agree with the sentiment (definitely something will disrupt heat/water/food access), I struggle with actually executing on doing anything other than having some real basics around. 30 days of spare food feels like such an enormous amount of space and material.
Mine is just a shelf of Chef Boyardee and Campbell's.
I eat one or two a week as regular lunches, to rotate stock. When there's some room at the empty end of the shelf, I shove everything down, and buy some new cans to stuff in at the intake end.
It takes no more time than going to the pantry for a can of soup regularly would. And saves time, because I'm _never_ out and scrambling to find another option. Whether I'm 8 cans down or 24, one trip to the store will replenish it regardless.
Don't overcomplicate it. Folks who blog about things tend to do so because they're proud they achieved something difficult, so you compare yourself to a difficult standard. Resist that.
This is the way. And I have no shame when I warm up a can of ravioli in the microwave at coworking.
Even though the campbell's exec declared it "poor food" the jazzy jambalaya has replaced our instant pot recipe. We buy two cans of it, add a package of microwaveable ready rice and have decent (although very carb and sodium heavy) dinner in ~3 minutes.
It also cooks up great in a small pot on a pocket rocket and tastes great right of the can as far as it being suitable for emergency food.
> 30 days of spare food feels like such an enormous amount of space and material.
Freeze dried stuff can be sit on a cool, dark shelf for a decade or two; a popular company:
* https://mountainhouse.com/
Also need to have a source of water and a way to boil it.
I feel similarly, but I did get some stuff in Feb 2020 when I could tell that COVID was going to be a huge deal. Camp stove, water storage containers, bulk bags of dry beans and rice, and several buckets of freeze dried food that have a shelf life of decades and could keep my family alive for at least a couple months. It's not really enough tbh, but it's something.
Did you get toilet paper? As I recall that was the main thing everybody was short of. (I'm lucky, we made our regular costco run about that time and got our regular 3 months supply of toilet paper and so didn't need more until supplies returned). The grocery stores all had plenty of fresh food (some things ran short, but there was always plenty)
So like a month of food and water? If the big electrical grid pop happens <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackou...>, we're looking at years, which no storage solution can accommodate. So while this is sensible for most outages, doesn't do much for this event, which becomes quite possible if (1) China moves on Taiwan and (2) USA intervenes on behalf of Taiwan. I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately
I suppose this could be true with the rest of CRINK since they are all capable cyber adversaries, but China is on another level in terms of capability and it's their best lever with little cost. I suppose they have to calculate whether the US would bring out the nukes in such a circumstance
> I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately
If they could do this, wouldn't they already have moved on Taiwan?
This is a sensible type of prepping. Prep for the things you will most likely face and some outliers within your geography. I myself could never understand the years worth of food types of folks. If things breakdown that much I don’t know much that food is going to matter.
Even if things do break down such that you need years of food people have the wrong things. You don't need gas for your generator, you need to learn how to live like 500 years ago - without all that. Have enough food to last until next spring, and enough seeds and farming knowledge (which you can get from a few books that you read after the disaster) that you can continue to live off of your garden.
As I said elsewhere, make sure you can share knowledge and work with other survivors. A community of people with various skills (even if you give them the book and they learn it) makes survival a lot easier. Maybe your garden fails, but if you have a few other people you work with you can support each other and everybody lives.
I'm in Switzerland and hadn't ever experienced a power outage in the 13 years I had been here but when Russia invaded Ukraine there was talk of intermittent rolling blackouts. They never happened but just in case I bought an ups for my home Ubuntu server and to my great surprise we had a blackout! There was a problem with a high-voltage power line coming from the mountains to my part of Zurich.
I happened to be in the cellar where I keep my server when it happened. The lights went out and I was in complete darkness other than the lights on the server and drives. I got my phone flashlight working and looked at the screen on the ups. It was working perfectly - the server was running and the amount of minutes remaining was dropping until there was five minutes left and my server initiated shutdown. Later that day when the power came back on the server booted back up.
So I'm a prepper too.
> We have a strong preference for sheltering in place, so we do not have a go bag or anything like that. We'd shelter in place because that's where all our preps are!
I don't totally understand this because quite a lot of disasters or threats will mean you can't shelter in place? Even if it's not your main thing to plan for how can a threat model just rule out wildfires, massive flooding, a hurricane or so on.
He lives in Washington. His likely disasters are not ones that mean move. Maybe a wildfire - some parts of Washington get fires, but they don't get hurricanes, and most are not subject to flooding (though this depends on where you live, one block down the street might be a problem - if he lives on the top of the hill is plans should be those living near the bottom shelter at his house).
Plan for the disasters that are likely where you are. I have plans for a tornado - I shelter in my basement until it blows over, and then the next morning the police will help me get to a hotel (tornadoes are to sudden too evacuate in time, but small enough that the local hotels have extra room). I don't have plans for a hurricane because the closest I get to a hurricane is when the weather reports the minor rain we are seeing is what is left of a major hurricane a week ago.
Prepping should be local. Here in Scotland the things I would prioritize are snowstorms (once had food delivery to supermarkets delayed for several days) and high winds (friend was without power for six days). Here we don't get true hurricanes or tornadoes, and the high winds events have been shelter in place events.
Some places in the UK might have to start worrying more about wildfires. Flooding is definitely on the rise.
(UK flooding is nearly always "you can save a lot of expensive damage with careful sandbagging" rather than "entire building swept away", though)
I'm reminded of a book I read a few years ago, Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O'Connell, which discusses (among other things) the phenomenon of "prepper" culture.
Holding 35L of water for 2 weeks drinking and 25L for 3 days flushing seems a bit out of whack
Why? Water for flushing is nice for hygiene in the most common case of short outages. And there's very little storage annoyance - heck if you need a bucket for a project, you dump it out and fill it back up from the hose when done.
Drinking water requires more expensive containers, and some thinking around keeping it fresh (rotation & potentially some chemical additives like bleach).
Not really. Not being able to flush is annoying, but you can do that outside. There are some health risks but they are manageable (human waste carries pathogens). 3 days is a very long disaster: if things are that bad you need to start activating other plans anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if where he lives he can just go to a nearby stream and refill his flush water anytime he wants.
Water is critical to life and so you want to be sure civilization won't return before you risk drinking random water. That said, I'd keep a camping water treatment instead (there are lots of options) since they take up less space.
Technically that's 60L for flushing.
I used to be a prepper, but have decided that moving remote is the only thing I'm willing to do anymore. If the world's population really does drop 99% from something, the person that kills me will be me. Totally hoping something like that doesn't happen.
If the world's population drops 99% odds are you are in the 99% not here anymore.
Probably. I'm probably in a survival area if it reduced by 85%.
How do you keep the drinking water actually drinkable over any time period? Anything stored gets nasty.
Every daylight savings time, I rotate my stored water. I empty out my containers, refilling them with, then add 7 drops of bleach per gallon.
* Edit * I've been asked before what the best survival book is. Honestly, it is One Second After by William R. Forstchen. It's probably the best description scenario that could occur.
It is not those regurgitated line drawings that everyone copies from Euell Gibbons, or rehashed rule of 3's survival books.
I really like the daylight savings thing.
You rotate it every ~6 months:
* https://www.cdc.gov/water-emergency/about/how-to-create-and-...
The old stuff can be used to water house plants or your garden. If you have advanced warning of an event (e.g., hurricane), you can also fill up a large reserve 'just in time':
* https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/waterbob-bathtub-liner-rev...
At the condo, I just rotate pet bottles. They are quite fimr for like a month, outside of direct sunlight.
And water can be always treated to make it drinkable again.
You don’t. You have RO at the point of consumption. At any rate, it’s our approach, we store 150,000L in a cistern over the winter and use it through the summer.
Non-potable just goes through the usual barrels full of sand and biochar, and doesn’t need further treatment.
Many houses have hot water heaters, which IMO is plenty for most people and the water naturally gets replaced through normal use.
Hot water heaters don’t heat water enough to kill bacteria and also they’re absolutely disgusting inside unless you’re one of the rare 0.1% of people who drain it annually and replace the sacrificial anode when it needs replacing.
Don’t drink from the hot water tap.
Third world behavior
A major hurricane hit my community in the US not too long ago, hundreds dead, a tremendous amount of the community destroyed. We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink.
In those early days post storm, I had neighbors regularly knocking on my door to make sure I was OK and I had enough food and water to get through the day. Since we had no internet, everyone was outside talking to each other, walking around and checking in. And we had huge cookouts at the houses with gas stoves so we could cook the perishable stuff before it went bad. Curfew was strict and law enforcement was everywhere, armed National Guard protected the grocery stores from looting.
It was a traumatic experience in some ways. I knew people that lost everything, had friends pulling bodies out of the river, sharing stories I never thought I'd hear in my life. But the community came together, and never once did I think "man I really wish I got into prepper culture".
I personally think it's insane to believe that someone could survive a major event like that completely independent of the community. Humanity got to where it is today because of community, not in spite of it. And prepper culture ignores all of that through it's "can't depend on anyone" ethos. I personally find it really sad.
Absolutely reliably the best way to increase your chance of survival in a situation like this is to have good relations with your neighbours in a good community with high trust.
A large number of people working together will be much more likely to find solutions than a few isolated individuals. The isolated individuals may have disproportionately large survival resources, but probably not for long. If you are in the caring-is-sharing group you will have a much better chance than being in the me-me-bang-oh-shit group.
But there are a lot of people who fear community solidarity because it might lead to people asking questions about private jets and beach condos.
> We had no water, power, or telecommunications for several days, no way to reach the outside world until the nearby cell towers came back online unless you had Starlink.
Amateur ("ham") radio can be handy. If you don't want to go to the effort to get a radio, a receive-only AM/FM crank/solar radio can be handy to get news.
They keep saying 'we' and 'our' but I'm pretty sure this is an 'I' and 'my' thing.
What do you mean? I assume the "we" and "our" refers to the author and his wife.