Understanding and preparing for emergencies is a key part of being a prudent and prepared homemaker. What follows in this post was originally written several months ago and posted in my forum. I’m moving all of this content to blog posts to make them easier to find and so they will reach a wider audience.

I’ve decided not to update the content below to reflect the pandemic we are currently living through. Why? I’d like you to try to read this with the mindset you would have had eight to twelve months ago. Would you have read this and thought I was a fear-mongering crazy person? And yet here we are, some of us still under stay at home orders months later.

The Government Recommends 14 Days, Not 3

The government now recommends that people have 14 days worth of provisions to care for themselves in an emergency. I think this is a change most people have missed. In the past, the government told people to be prepared to take care of themselves for three days after a disaster. This meant making sure you always have enough food, water, power, and other necessary supplies on hand to take care of yourself for a minimum of three days.

The recommendation is now 14 days. Were you aware of that?

I think this is significant in a number of ways.

• One, the authorities anticipate complicated situations.
• Two, for every household the government can get to prepare for fourteen days, there is a chance that family will also be able to help others.
• Three, every household that doesn’t need help lessens the response burden.

Ready.gov is the site set up by the Department of Homeland Security. It has a wealth of information including general lists for building emergency kits you can add to your Prudent & Prepared Homemaker binder.

To give you a bit of extra incentive, let me share two things with you based on information from the federal government.

Cascadia Rising Exercise

The state of Washington did a huge simulation in 2016 called the Cascadia Rising Exercise regarding the very real and substantial thread posed by the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ). (If you aren’t familiar with the Cascadia situation, I’ll put a video below.)

The results of this were grim and you can look at the Cascadia Rising Exercise After Action Report (no longer available). One post I read said that they realized that they would have a full-blown humanitarian crisis on their hands in only ten days. In the United States of America.

New Madrid Fault

This is a video I created. If you live anywhere east of the Mississippi River, you need to be aware of this. Even if you don’t live in that immediate area, you will be impacted. I explain why in the video.

Even if you aren’t going to be impacted by either of these particular natural disasters, we all have at least one risk where we live. You need to have a plan.

And not just for a couple of days. But weeks.

Pandemics and Quarantines

Writing about the threat of pandemics and quarantines has been on my to do list of topics since the very beginning of creating this content. I actually had not planned on writing about it this early in the flow of topics, but given the developing situation coming out of China I decided to jump on it this afternoon and evening.

Writing about pandemics seems a bit overblown in our society today. We haven’t had a significant pandemic in the U.S.A. since the Spanish Flu a hundred years ago. But there are no guarantees. No one really knows yet what is going to happen with the Coronavirus. It could end up being nothing. It could end up being catastrophic.

What I want you to ask yourself is what you would do if you woke up and found out your town or city (or state) had been put under a quarantine. We think it can’t happen in the U.S.A. Are you sure? Are you willing to take that gamble?

What would happen if you and your loved ones were quarantined for two weeks? Are you ready? What about a full blown pandemic? What if you really didn’t want to leave your home for a month?

If you aren’t sure, then you need to start making some plans and implementing them. The time to prepare for a possible bad situation is not when the government announces that we’re in the midst of something really bad. It’s weeks or months before that.

This situation may come to nothing. That would be fantastic. I hope it is the case. But if you prepare for the worst in the coming week and nothing serious develops where you live, you won’t have done it in vain. You’ll simply be better prepared for the next power outage, blizzard, or other run-of-the-mill emergency.

I hope you will take the time to read through the information in this series of posts and act on it.

Timing and Emergencies

Planning, preparing, and timing can be a tricky business. We should never make plans out of fear which I’ve written about before in Dealing with Anxiety Related to Emergencies.

At the same time, if you wait for official word that there is a problem then you are too late. Once a critical mass of people realize that it’s time to be concerned and take action, you are way too late. It will be much more difficult to purchase and do the things you wish to do. I wrote about this when I addressed the many pitfalls of just-in-time delivery in 3 Reasons To Become a Prudent & Prepared Homemaker.

A friend emailed today and asked me if I was seeing a lot more activity in this forum given the current situation in China and now around the world. I responded that it’s tricky to know how much to discuss this topic and encourage people to read what I write here. Should I write more? How much should I write? I don’t want to be a fear monger and drive people away from my website. Prudent & Prepared is just a small part of what I do here.

On the other hand, I think this is the biggest potential pandemic threat of my lifetime. If I’m reading and learning, I feel like I should share what I’m discerning. This may all come to nothing here in the USA and I sincerely hope it does. I do not want to live through a pandemic or a quarantine. At all. I’m not one of these people who gets excited about the thought of people suffering so I can be “right” about something. I’d rather be completely wrong.

We each have to decide how much of a threat we feel this is. If you are at all inclined toward taking action, then do it now. Don’t wait. If you take a wait and see attitude, then you may not get the chance to act. Better to act now and do some things for your family’s well-being than wait two or three weeks to see how things develop and find out you missed the ideal window.

If this thing does increase the way some health experts are discussing, then the ideal window is now. It isn’t in a week or two. It’s today and this weekend. Every day that passes means more people start thinking about the potential problems. And every day that people start thinking about potential problems means more people start acting. It doesn’t even have to be a visible panic and rush to purchase things. It can be people quietly going to the store and buying much more than they usually do and taking it home. If you get enough people doing that quietly, you will start to see shortages.

Timing is everything in something like this. If you aren’t worried, then just ignore what I’ve written. If you have any prompting or prodding that maybe you should think about doing something, then do it. Don’t wait.

This situation will not get more ideal than it is right now if it is going to escalate.

Emergencies and Threat Assessments

Part of being prudent and prepared is knowing which emergencies are most likely to impact you. They can vary from the mundane to the catastrophic. No one can prepare for every situation. No one has enough time or money.

But we can take an honest look at the biggest threats that face us depending on where we live and individual factors in our life.

I’ve put together My Threat Assessment Plans to help you do just that. The download includes a comprehensive list of potential emergencies including personal, utilities, weather, natural disaster, supply chain issues, and more. It also contains a worksheet where you can brainstorm what you would need to plan for for each circumstance.

The Prudent & Prepared Homemaker

Read All of the Posts in the Series

3 Reasons To Become A Prudent & Prepared Homemaker

5 Reasons To Keep Written Pantry & Emergency Notes

4 Must-Know Tips About Stocking a Pantry 

3 Tips for Building Your Pantry 

7 Places To Find Extra Money For Stocking Your Pantry

3 Reasons Most “First Things to Buy” Prepper Lists Are Worthless

4 Tips to Deal with Emergency Anxiety

4 Facts About Preparing For Emergencies

3 Unusual Tips For Emergency Preparedness

11 Ways To Prepare Your Home For A Storm

4 Important Tips About Safe Water

4 Types of People Who Should Buy a 14-Day Emergency Food Supply Pack

4 Tips For Discussing Emergency Preparedness With Children