Of all the natural disasters I cover on this site, flooding is the one that most consistently catches people off guard. Not because it’s unpredictable — in many cases flood warnings come hours or even days in advance. It catches people off guard because of a deeply human tendency to underestimate water. People see a…
Of all the natural hazards I cover on this site, extreme heat is the one that kills the most people in the United States every year — and the one that gets the least respect. There are no dramatic images of extreme heat the way there are of tornadoes or hurricanes. No radar signatures to…
There are some emergencies that announce themselves. Hurricanes build for days on radar. Tornadoes trigger sirens. Floods rise gradually enough that you usually have some warning window to act. Earthquakes give you nothing. No forecast, no alert, no countdown. One moment everything is normal, and the next the ground beneath your feet is moving and…
I want to start this post differently than most cybersecurity articles you’ve probably read. I’m not going to open with statistics about how many millions of people get hacked every year. I’m going to tell you what happened to me — because it’s the kind of thing that sounds like it happens to other people,…
Most preparedness content focuses on natural disasters — hurricanes, tornadoes, floods. Those are real threats, and I cover all of them on this site. But there’s another category of emergency that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, partly because it makes people uncomfortable to talk about: civil unrest. Riots. Protests that turn violent. Looting. Neighborhoods on…
I’ve spent over twenty years behind the wheel, and in that time I’ve learned something that most drivers never think about until they’re stranded on the side of a road: your vehicle is only as reliable as the preparation you’ve put into it. Not just the car itself — but what you carry in it,…
If there’s one piece of emergency gear I feel most strongly about, it’s the bug out bag. Not because it’s the most exciting thing to talk about — but because it’s the one thing that could make the difference between getting your family out safely and scrambling to find your shoes while the clock is…