Disasters can happen to anyone, anywhere. These tips for disaster preparedness can help people save their own lives. By taking the time to review and analyze your situation before a crisis occurs, you'll find yourself better able to overcome emergencies. 

1) Perform a Personal Risk Assessment

A personal risk assessment will help you identify the major disasters and emergencies that you should prepare for. After all, if you live in Miami, preparing for a blizzard may not be a very good use of resources. However, preparing for a hurricane is probably an excellent use of your resources. Similarly, if you live in California, you’ll probably want to focus on earthquakes and wildfires rather than tornados. It’s important to remember also to consider situations that many people don’t typically prepare for, such as an EMP or another often overlooked possibility.

Red Cross Disasters Page

If you’d like to check out other possible scenarios to make sure you’ve done a thorough job with your risk assessment, you can go to the Red Cross website. There, you’ll find a long list of potential disaster scenarios along with disaster preparedness tips to help you prepare for each possible scenario. It’s well worth the time to check it out.

Normalcy Bias

Now, I doubt any of you Mind4Survival Survivors have this issue, but we never know. However, if you are someone who believes your area won’t be affected by disasters, you’re sadly mistaken. If you’ve ever said, "That could never happen to me," you may be suffering from normalcy bias. If you believe a disaster or other emergency won’t ever impact you, you’re probably wrong, very wrong.

2) Prepare for Bugging In

Regardless of the situation, when disaster strikes, you only have two choices. You can bug in or bug out. Bugging in means you’re going to stay in your home and attempt to ride out the situation, whatever it is. The primary key to think about when making your decision is that you may be stuck once you choose to shelter in place. Think of the people stranded by floods. If they were slow in getting out, they often couldn’t get out.

If you decide that bugging in is an option as you make your disaster response plans, you’ll want to make sure you are prepared. After all, if the situation is dire enough to consider leaving your home, it’s probably so tricky that you may be stuck on your own for a while. So again, you’ll want to make sure you follow these disaster preparedness tips for a shelter-in-place scenario.

Some reasons to consider bugging in are:

Disabilities: If you or a loved one has a disability that makes bugging out very difficult. The fact of the matter is that not all of us can quickly pack up and leave our homes. Due to life circumstances, some of us may be forced to stay at home and ride out a disaster.

Prior Preparation: You have prepared ahead of time for a bugging-in scenario. This means you’ve stocked up on food, fuel, and water. You should consider alternate means of communication. Since cell phones and hard-lined phones may be down, having another means of communication to receive updates on the situation and to let people know how you’re doing will be significant. Additionally, as we saw in Hurricane Katrina and other disasters, evil people try to capitalize on the situation to do bad things. So, you’ll want to be ready to defend yourself. Fortunately, not all the people you’ll meet in a bug-in scenario are dangerous. Some may be stuck in a bad spot just like you, and you may want to be prepared to help others. Yes, that’s a controversial subject within the prepping community. Ultimately, it’s a personal decision each of us needs to make.

Reliable Transportation: If you don’t have a reliable means of transportation, bugging out could put you in a worse position than bugging in. Think about it. Would you rather be in your home during a disaster,