What to do before, during, and after every kind of emergency.
By the Preparedness Team Almost everything written about water preparedness assumes the tap has stopped. Filtering from a creek, storing barrels in the basement, catching rain off a roof: all of it answers the question of what to do when nothing comes out of the faucet. That is the dramatic failure, and it is also … Read more
By the Climate Team Most of what a household prepares for arrives without notice. Tornadoes give you minutes, earthquakes give you nothing, and a grid failure announces itself by going dark. Seasonal climate patterns are the rare exception. They build slowly, they are visible months ahead, and they shift the odds of specific hazards in … Read more
By the Homestead Team There is a number in the USDA’s avian influenza data that most flock owners have never seen, and it reframes the entire subject. Since the current outbreak began in 2022, roughly 1,431 poultry flocks in the United States have had confirmed cases. Of those, about 652 were commercial operations and about … Read more
By the Climate Team A heat wave that began in the last days of June has now stretched across most of a month, and it is not finished. As of late July 2026, a fresh and unusually strong heat dome has built over the Rockies and Plains and is pushing east, and the numbers underneath … Read more
By the Homesteading Team When the power goes out, one of the first quiet questions is a simple one: how do we eat something hot, and how do we boil water? For all of human history people cooked without a grid, so the knowledge is old and the tools are cheap. What trips people up … Read more
By the Health & Safety Team The disaster most likely to tear through your household this year will not arrive as a storm or a blackout. It arrives as a stomach bug: one person doubled over at 2 a.m., and within two days half the family is down. Foodborne and stomach illnesses are the quiet, … Read more
By the Preparedness Team A few winters back, a member of our extended family slid off a county road at dusk, twenty minutes from town, in a dead cell zone. Nobody was hurt. But the car sat nose-down in a ditch for four hours before a plow driver spotted it, and the honest inventory of … Read more
By the Gear Team Q: My phone gets emergency alerts. Why would I need a radio? A: Because your phone’s alerts depend on two fragile things at once: cell towers with a few hours of backup power, and your battery. In the disasters where information matters most (hurricanes, ice storms, wildfires, multi-day grid failures) cell … Read more
By the Emergency Planning Team Every emergency plan has two halves. One is leaving: the evacuation, the go-bag, the route out. The other, quieter half is staying, and it is the one most people never plan for. Shelter-in-place means making your home the safest place to be and hunkering down until a threat passes. For … Read more
By the Preparedness Team Few threats inspire more dread and more misinformation than radiation. Decades of movies have left people believing a nuclear or radiological emergency is automatically unsurvivable, so they either panic or dismiss it entirely. The reality, according to emergency management science, is that many people in an affected area can significantly improve … Read more
By the Personal Safety Team Civil unrest is unsettling precisely because it turns familiar, ordinary places, a downtown street, a route you drive every day, into something unpredictable. Whatever its cause, the practical goal for a family is the same and refreshingly simple: stay out of it and stay safe. This is not about taking … Read more
By the Preparedness Team Not long ago, a global pandemic was the kind of scenario most people filed under unlikely. Then one arrived and reshaped daily life for years, and it turned out that the households which coped best were not the ones with the most dramatic gear, but the ones with quiet, sensible preparations: … Read more
Affiliate link; we may earn a small commission.