Here are the free survival tips and the other emergency preparedness information you requested.We have also sent you an email with this information so you can easily find it in the future. If you can’t find the email, check your spam or junk folder.
- Here is the Family Disaster Recovery Planning Guide.
- And here are the Survival Tips articles (with videos included):
- Stock water and nonperishable food
- Have an alternate source of heat
- Stock flashlights, batteries, and candles
- Keep and bear arms
- Keep an emergency survival kit
These tips are based on almost a century of combined experience with civil defense, military, and other formal and informal survival skills training.* They will help you focus on the most important steps you can take to prepare for extended power outages and natural disasters.
Click on the tips to get detailed explanations including contingency planning suggestions. Check back often because we’re adding more details all the time.
Note that the tips will vary in importance depending on your circumstances. Urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness living all require different priorities in survival planning. Besides location, other factors include whether or not you are alone, your physical condition, your financial condition, and your current level of survival skills. Feel free to change the order of these survival tips to suit your needs.
Below you’ll learn how to avoid the two most common emergency planning mistakes, and the Survival Tips articles and videos are at the bottom of the page.
How to Avoid the Most Common Emergency Planning Mistakes
YOU ARE NOW about to join a growing minority of people who make emergency preparedness a part of their everyday experience. We suggest you make developing these skills a family project. That way it will be fun, build strong family bonds, and create a network of people you can count on (and who can count on you) in time of need.
But first I want to clue you in on the two most common mistakes people make in preparing for emergencies, and how you can avoid them. Almost anyone can come up with an emergency plan, but they almost always forget the two most important things. The most important thing you can do in developing your survival skills is avoid these two common mistakes.
First, use contingency planning. Contingency planning is quite simply the “backup” plan, also known as “plan B.” For example, suppose you have diligently prepared an earthquake plan for your family. You’ve designed the escape route from the house, you’ve decided who would run get the baby and who would get the two-year-old, and you’ve set the meeting place in the front yard. But on earthquake day, you run out to the front yard only to find that the neighboring townhouse has collapsed, and the front yard is a two-story pile of rubble. Where should you meet your family now? What’s your contingency plan?
You back up your most important computer files, right? When you have guests for dinner, don’t you cook a couple extra chicken thighs “just in case?” So when you’re planning something that could make the difference between life and death, having a contingency plan just makes good sense.
The second big mistake most people make is fail to practice. If you go on a Caribbean cruise, the day your ship sinks is too late to learn to swim. The day the house catches fire is too late to find your way down the hall, down the stairs, and out the door while blinded by smoke. The day you’re caught in the wilderness and your children are freezing is too late to learn how to make a fire. You get the idea.
Practicing is entirely up to you. Fortunately, it can be loads of fun. Your kids will find it a whole lot more interesting to practice fire drills than to rot their brains away in front of the TV.
In sum, to avoid the most common emergency planning mistakes, do these two things:
- Make sure everyone knows plan B
- Practice
*By “informal” training we mean the kind of training you get from spending time with others who have years of survival skills experience, like when Grandpa taught his grandkids how to clean fish or build a fire. This kind of training is just as valuable as formal survivalist courses and military training. Passing on this kind of knowledge to the younger ones in your family is one of the greatest legacies you can leave behind.