My sister has been asking me more and more lately ‘What do I need to have to be ready for the terrible shit that is coming?’.
First, we need to start with a plan!
I’m going to use this question from her as an excuse to walk through the process of analyzing a region for the most likely scenarios you may encounter and how to prepare for them. We will use this process to inform our emergency plans, and finally decide what items we need to buy, or skills we need to practice.
This process will show you how to think about emergency planning and preparedness in a way that can be repeated and is applicable for any region that you may be reading from.
She lives in Miami Florida, within the city and as such we will do some analysis on the risks and disasters that she is most vulnerable to while living there.
FEMA maintains a site where you can look up the ‘risk’ level of a region: https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map
The website provides a lot of great information to get you started with your personal emergency planning.
This is what the FEMA site shows for southeast Florida. It’s dark red with a risk index of VERY HIGH! Let’s break this down a bit more. The FEMA site also allows you to generate a printable report for the selected region, which I did.
The report shows you multiple tables breaking down their data more. The site appears to be primarily tailored towards helping insurance companies forecast future claims, which is great because it means that this information is based on real data. I found this Risk Factor Breakdown table to be the most useful.
What I like about this table is that they have ranked the Risk Factors in order by EAL (Estimated Annual Loss), which we can use a proxy for which risks are both highly likely and bring extreme consequences.
It’s no surprise to me to see Hurricanes at the top of the list, but there are a few surprising events on the list. Wildfire?! Cold Wave?! It’s really hard to imagine a wildfire in the Florida humidity, but I suppose anything’s possible. I think the cold wave makes the list since most homes in Miami do not have any heating capability, so even a relatively moderate drop in temperatures could put a lot of people at risk of ‘freezing’. The FEMA data also includes an index for ‘Social Vulnerability’, and ‘Community Resilience’, both of which Miami scores very poorly on. Miami, do better smh.
The FEMA website is great for determining regional natural disaster risks, but doesn’t include disasters beyond natural disasters. That’s why you don’t see power outages, civil unrest, nor pandemics on the list.
Let’s step back for a minute. When my sister asked me what she should buy to prepare for ‘the shit that’s coming’ she wasn’t referring to a hurricane, she of course meant the inevitable long term destruction of the U.S. power grid by a near peer cyber threat, such as China. 😉
So why am I talking about hurricanes?
Three reasons:
- The chances of a hurricane occurring are very high
- Being prepared for a hurricane will help you be prepared for a wide variety of common emergencies, and provides a solid foundation for preparing for other long term disasters
- We can talk about preparing for hurricanes without sounding like total lunatics
In fact, by the end of this series you will see that prepping for most scenarios is nearly the same. What we really need is a prioritized list of items and skills to acquire to prepare for a wide swath of potential disasters.
In the next post we’ll talk more specifically about how to prepare for Hurricanes, since we have decided that a Hurricane is the number 1 threat to those living in south east Florida.
Practical Prepping 