The theme this week on the Retirement Quick Tips Podcast is: Prepping for emergencies in 2022.

Today, Let’s talk about the emergencies you will most likely face, and why that means you shouldn’t prep for the Zombie apocalypse like today’s title suggests.

I’ve lived in the Portland, OR area my whole life and have been through 2 memorable earthquakes - the first one in March 1993, which was a magnitude of 5.6 about 30 miles from Portland. This happened in the early, pre-dawn hours. I was 8 years old and I ran out of the house along with my dad, which is something that you are definitely not supposed to do in an earthquake! My mom and my sister slept right through it. The 2nd one happened in 2001 in the middle of the day. I was at school at the time and remember feeling this weird sensation of waves like I was on a boat. Neither caused any real damage, but it’s been drilled into me since a kid that we are well overdue for a massive and devastating earthquake here on the west coast.

How bad could it be? In 2016 the US Navy, Coast Guard, and Washington state’s National Guard did a full-scale, nine-day drill to test how well they could respond to a massive earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. That area covers Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland through northern California. The 83-page report comes to a lot of scary conclusions. The authors admit the systems are not ready, infrastructure would collapse, and they’d have a full-blown humanitarian crisis in ten days. We recently interviewed the Portland Water Bureau, and they had a similar message about an earthquake in that region: a million people in that 225-square-mile area will be without water for months, not days.” Months, not days! Eye opening.

The most likely emergencies where I live would be a power outage due to a snowstorm or a heat wave, an earthquake, and wildfires, and probably in that order of likelihood. So my preparations need to reflect the likely events that I’ll face. Instead of building a tornado shelter, I would focus on not keeping all of my emergency items - food, water, tools, medical supplies, etc in one spot. Things get crushed and ruined in earthquakes or something could get so buried that I can’t access it and it becomes worthless. 

I also need supplies stored in my car and what’s commonly known as a bug out bag. This is a trimmed down list of items that my family and I can take if we need to leave our home, which would be very important if an earthquake makes our home unsafe to stay in or if a wildfire gets too close. 

And probably most common but often overlooked are the everyday emergencies we might face. Things like a burglar, a kitchen fire, or health event like a choking or a heart attack. Or a financial emergency like a job loss. It would be nice to have 3 months of food on hand so you could dramatically reduce your household food spending while you look for a new job. 

So a great place to start is to research and understand the most common types of emergencies you’ll face, based on where you live. 

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening! My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the Retirement Quick Tips podcast. 

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