This is part one in a series of posts about how to get started Prepping in an Organized way.
As I’ve mentioned a time or two before one of the first things I did was make a ton of different lists of stuff I needed, things to do, skills to learn, etc. But the first list you really need to make is “What am I Prepping For?” This is a list that will help guide all your other lists and more importantly help you set priorities and goals for everything on your other lists.
Now this may seem simple, but we’re not going to stop at just a simple list of everything that could go wrong. You need to assess everything you put on that list with an eye of “how likely is this to happen?” Then we need to drill into each of those areas and assess them around the needs you will have in those events.
My list of scenarios has grown overtime, and I group them into Natural Disasters, Man-Made Disasters, and TEOTWAWKI.
Natural Disasters are things like your basic flood, earthquake, etc. Man-Made Disasters are things like Hazardous Material Spills, Terrorism, a Regional War (not in your region), house fire, etc. TEOTWAKI events are Global Nuclear War, Super Volcanos, economic collapse, etc. I’ll put a more complete list at the end of this post to help with your considerations.
Next you want to put some type of scoring on these events for how likely you think they are to occur. I wouldn’t get too complicated here; high, medium, low is probably good enough. If you want (and I did) you could put a timeframe on it. For example, if Economic Collapse is on your list you might say that it’s a “Medium Likelihood in next 12 months” but a “High Likelihood in 12 to 18 months”. Again the idea here is just to help you make some priority calls as you’re going through the rest of your planning.
Having completed this list, now you want to stack rank them based on the timelines and how likely they are. I highly recommend that after you make this initial list you put it away, go do something uplifting, and sleep on it. (Side note: There are actually quite a few studies out there that suggest sleeping on a complex problem does actually help your brain come up with better answers.)
Anyway, come back to it later, discuss with your spouse/significant other, and try to have some consensus.
Next post we’ll start to dive into what to do with this list.
My example scenarios below (add whatever keeps you up at night, and remove any that don’t make sense…everyone’s situation is different)
Natural Disasters
Man-Made Disasters
TEOTWAWKI
Flood
Electric Blackout
Economic Collapse
Earthquake
Hazardous Material Spill
Local War (near you)
Blizzard
Air Pollution
Global Nuclear War
Tornado
House Fire
Super Volcano
Hurricane
Radiation Leak
Asteroid Strike
Harsh Winter
Food/Water Contamination
Global Famine
Ice Storm
Industrial Chemical Release
Global Pandemic
Thunderstorm
Oil Spill
Global Impacting Solar Storm
Heat Wave
Distant War
Wild Fire
Terrorism
Drought
Crime
Volcano
Civil Unrest
Landslide
Sinkhole
Regional Pandemic
Tsunami
Hail
Avalanche
Solar Storm