Why Prepare?
It’s easy to hear the call to prepare and recognize that you probably should, but it’s just as easy to ignore the call completely. After all, most of us have lived decades without encountering any major disasters. With a track record like that, preparing for an unlikely disaster is probably just a waste of time!
Wouldn’t life be great if preparing for disasters was a waste of time?
Unfortunately, there are some pretty inspiring reasons to prepare.
Here are five things that have caused our team to get off our a$$es and get organized:
1. It’s 90 Seconds to Midnight!
Have you heard of The Doomsday Clock? After the US killed more than 100,000 people in Japan by dropping two atomic bombs in a single week, the people who designed those bombs realized they had created more problems than they had solved. Two years after the bombs were dropped, the clock debuted at 7 minutes to midnight. Since then, continued nuclear proliferation and other massive, manmade dangers have bumped the hands to 90 seconds to midnight. That’s the closest we’ve ever been.
Midnight signifies the complete destruction of humanity, so things are… tense, to say the least. Super smart science people think major problems beyond our individual control are around the corner? Sounds like a good time to get prepped for the worst.
2. Fires Are Hella Bold These Days
Maybe it’s because we’re a California-based team, but every year, more of our family, friends, and acquaintances are losing their homes to wildfires. What gives, fire? Did you get bored with your 6.07 x 10^18 square meters of all-fire-all-the-time surface area on the sun and decide to take a vacation on our watery homeland? Or was it something we did?
“With continued high emissions of greenhouse gases, models project that the risk of very large wildfires will increase by up to six-fold in parts of the United States by mid-century.” Ah, fair play. Time to invest in that flame-resistant siding.
3. 100 Year Floods Are Becoming 30 Year Floods
If you bought a house a few miles away from a major river in the early 2000s, your research might have shown that it was only likely for a flood to reach your property in about 1% of flood events, aka a 100 Year Flood.
In the last 20 years, you might have noticed that there were way more flood events than you expected, and that more than one of them has reached your property. That’s because flood dynamics are changing as storm dynamics change and sea levels rise. What can you do about it? Get ready to run.
4. FEMA Can’t Handle This
Whether the image emblazoned on your mind is of Kanye West justifiably saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” on live TV after Hurricane Katrina or 45 blithely throwing paper towels to a crowd after Hurricane Maria killed thousands in Puerto Rico, we are all familiar with the US government’s poor responses to disasters.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is responsible for dealing with natural disasters, and they always struggle to meet the mark when major disasters occur. Whether they’re facing staffing shortages or funding problems, FEMA is fighting an uphill battle against a series of disasters that won’t let up anytime soon. If you’re relying fully on the government to save you after a disaster, I hope your needs aren’t urgent when the time comes.
5. Climate Disasters Are Becoming Increasingly Common
If you’re particularly astute, you’ll have already noticed that every item on this list has been related to climate change. It’s just an unavoidable fact of our modern world: climate change does what it says on the tin. Things are changing. Predictability is out. Constant anxiety is in.
We don’t know when the next disaster will be, but we know that it’s likely to happen sooner than we think and could easily be more intense than any we’ve seen before.
Can’t get enough of the beach? Get ready for a hurricane.
Love the mountains? I hope you love being snowed in for weeks at a time.
Addicted to splish-splashing in the river? There’s a flood with your name on it.
The list could go on, but the point is clear.
We’re left to our own devices in the world we created. This project is called “Here Comes the Apocalypse” because the disasters are coming… whether we like it or not. We can run, but we may not be able to hide.
Preparing is a great way to understand what’s on the horizon and develop exit strategies that will keep us safe, even if we live in places that are prone to disaster.
Will you ignore the call to prepare?
If you’re ready to take the leap, our Disaster Playbook makes it easy. Start out with defining your “why.” Why do you prepare?
