The mindset is actually a large component of this guide, and it intentionally delays any discussion of "prepper gear" until it gets through a long laundry list of lifestyle tips and discussing the need to plan ahead, figure out what is likely, what can go wrong, what the decisions points may be, etc. In contrast to most other prepping docs, weapons are literally the last thing discussed, and only in a perfunctory way.

That said, I think that your view of emergency preparedness is far more narrow than what I aimed for in the guide. A significant focus of the doc is dealing with small-scale but common adversities, such as recessions / unemployment, house fires, backed-up sewage, and other "boring" but life-altering contingencies. Basically, the stuff that almost everybody will need to face at some point in their lives.

I'd wager that for 90%+ of the events that a typical person in the US is likely to experience, heading into the woods to forage on berries and hunt wildebeest is not the way to go.

begin by shopping for ballistic vests and night vision goggles; they would be better served by grabbing a fire extinguisher, some bottled water, and then putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund.

is right on point, but IMO that just says - hey don't be insane.

Literally right now, my good friends are being rescued from a rooftop in Houston. No number of bottles of water in their basement or generators are going to help them. They are lucky in that they have some discretionary funds and Flood insurance, but more likely than not (if history repeats itself) they wont get fully paid out for what they lost.

What they should have done is learned when to move or when to stay by: 1. Not buying a house in Houston and then 2. Gotten out well before it was imminent.

Small scale common adversities like you are talking about can get critical really quickly. All those preparations, other than just having savings, is just making you slightly more comfortable and buy you a little bit of time so that you can make a bigger plan. Good, but insufficient and gives you a false sense of security. Again, these are things I've seen over and over.

Planning for the range of disasters from a month of unemployment and TEOTWAWKI is the same basic mental change, not just a full basement and bank account.

I thought of them reading about Harvey and I am wondering if they will show up on the news at some point.

I compared it a bit to my efforts to insure my house remains intact and upright in the event of an earthquake (the 'likely' disaster where I live).

People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind.

I bolted as soon as I could to gain employment and the resources of a bigger city. It still boggles my mind that more people my age don't, as things seem to be getting worse rather than better. But it's home, it's familiar, it's comforting, no matter what issues may loom. I had cousins refuse to leave post-Katrina New Orleans for similar reasons.

Sorry, just a comparison to your line of thinking from a different angle, slightly related.

AndrewKemendo says: "People's aversion to moving, especially after a major disaster, boggles my mind."

But where do you go to be safe from disasters?

California - earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, torrential rains, rip currents, and even volcanoes

Gulf Coast - hurricanes

Midwest - tornadoes

etc.

Slate Magazine set out to find where you could live free of potential disasters. See:

"Where To Hide From Mother Nature"

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/200...

Their conclusion:

"Slate's "America's Best Place to Avoid Death Due to Natural Disaster": the area in and around Storrs, Conn., home to the University of Connecticut..."

Read the article to see if you're ready to make the move.

There are plenty of places to go.

For some reason we seem to love to build massive cities on disaster areas. I'm looking at you SF, LA and NYC.

But hey fuck it, lets just continue being bad at statistics and assume that because a natural disaster happened recently it won't happen again for a long time (the idea of a "500 year" storm is insane).

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/media/top-10-safest-us-cities-from-n...

[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/cascadia-subduction-zone-ea...

You can't just name three places in a very large country and then say 'etc'.

There are plenty of places with much lower risks of natural disasters. That's a big part of the reason my family lives in central New York.

Probably just the tip of the iceberg in a state that sees a lot of annual rainfall.

I live in the hills southeast of Syracuse.

Snow? A minor inconvenience, at worst. It's a frequent enough occurrence that municipalities are we set up to deal with it. If you don't have snow tires, there will be maybe 24-48 hours per year that you won't want to go driving (with snow tires, that timeframe is an order of magnitude less).

There were at least four times in the twenty years that I lived in upstate NY that snowstorms caused power outages and impassable roads at the same time.

You can't just name one place as safe from natural disasters and then explain that the two natural disasters that they get there don't count.

We can actually build structures that can withstand [the most common] tornadoes, without adding too much to the cost of construction. Basically, monolithic concrete shell structures over inflatable forms are effectively "tornado proof", without additional engineering.

The nasty natural disasters in the Midwest are not just blizzards, but freezing rain storms. A coating of ice an inch thick on everything is guaranteed to take down trees and power lines, and make all roads completely impassable. You get up to a week without civilization. For example, if your furnace catches fire, you can call 911, and later find out that the first fire truck they sent out slid off the road into a ditch on the way to your house, and the guys that finally showed up two hours later were the second truck, sent over from the next township (true story). On the Great Plains, it's drought and brushfires. You get to spend a season watching everything turn brown, and then your town burns because some jackoff threw a cigarette butt out of his window on the highway, or because lightning struck the wrong spot.

Thanks to modern meteorology, tornadoes are just much less a threat than they used to be. They might pick off a person here or there every season, but when they do, there will always be neighbors around ready to help. They just don't wipe out an entire city, leaving everyone essentially on their own, because they are all (sometimes literally) in exactly the same boat.

And that's exactly why I am comfortable living in an area where the major natural disaster threats are tornadoes and flash floods.

Social connections, networks that enable employment, and a lack of serious financial reserves (which will always be true for ~50% of people) are the main reasons.

And no area is immune to disaster and lacks challenges.

The "low natural disaster" areas have a total lack of warning before disaster strikes, heavy snowfall that can cripple normal services, deserts with poisonous creatures, or some combination of those three.

For the most part, to be perfectly honest, as long as you are capable of picking up and moving on short notice...hurricane country is actually safer due to the amount of warning you get.

Natural disasters, perhaps.

That region doesn't have a great record in terms of political stability, and often has the bad luck of being in the middle of a warzone though.

There's about 1/10th of the region that was in a war zone in the last 70 years (Yugoslavia, Eastern Ukraine), and those wars didn't really concern neighboring countries.

Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke :p

That 70 years (which is debatable!) maybe the longest period of peace in the area in recorded history. Possibly the peace of 1871 to 1914 is the only other alternative.

Here's a list of conflicts in Europe since 1945[1]. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union there were some conflicts. For example, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was in 1968 and was a reasonable major conflict.

(Note that I'm not claiming that Eastern/Central Europe is unique in this! Mostly densely populated areas are similar, and Western Europe scores only slightly better if you don't count revolutionary movements within the counties).

Regarding political stability, I'd argue that a huge part of the region was very stable for 40 years, under the Communist yoke

Yes, indeed this is true. As I note above the 1945-1990 period was very stable except for Czechoslovakia invasion of course. They were pretty lucky in Poland in the 1980s too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea

You can never predict the future but I'm willing to bet that the following countries will be peaceful for at least the next 20 years:

- Czech Republic

- Slovakia

- Poland

- Hungary

- Slovenia

- Croatia

- Romania

- Albania

Places like the Czech Republic will probably be among the safest places on Earth, both regarding economic, political stability and possible outside aggression, for the next half a century, in my opinion.

On the other hand, people were saying similar things before WW1 :D

Hmm. I'm not sure that is a great way of looking at it while Russia is still there.

Poland

I'm not sure about that. The Kaliningrad Oblast is a real problem - historically oblasts haven't been very stable politically.

Generally speaking though, I think most of those countries are NATO members (not sure about Albania?). That means that if any NATO member country is attacked they will all be dragged in.

If the US got dragged into a war on the Korean peninsular then I'm not sure Putin could resist the temptation of Estonia or Latvia. And I'm not sure what would happen then.

Or who knows what will happen in (NATO Member) Turkey. Three years ago they nearly got in a shooting war with Russia. Now they are good friends.. at the moment.

I've spent some great times in Central Europe, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the area. But that doesn't mean there aren't real, significant risks.

There was a period where the banking regulator for New Zealand was going to force all the major banks to move their IT shops from Wellington to Christchurch because Wellington was at too high a risk of a natural disaster.

A couple of years later, an earthquake on a hitherto-unknown fault flattened Christchurch.

Let alone moving means you need to convince your Family and their other family and their other family's family to move etc. Or go it alone but ties like that are strong.

Is everyone on HN moving to their optimal place regardless of friends or family considerations?

Most people are not going to have to worry about a hurricane or a flood. Most people have more mundane problems, that are still potentially life altering.

I live in a place where other than a 3-4 days of average annual disruption due to snow, the only real natural disaster risks are associated by poorly engineered and maintained sewers backing up.

I find it bizarre that I've spent millions over the years providing disaster recovery and resiliency for relatively unimportant things, but the combo of a devastating hurricane in Texas and major earthquake in Northern California could essentially trigger a economic calamity.

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/06/the-floating-houses-of-...

    its sewer connection was just the house pipe inset
    into the city pipe

Some of this outcome is a direct result of conforming to commercially-fabricated social pressure. In this particular case, floodplain maps are publicly and freely available, so anyone can build structures that rise well above the highest-projected floods.

Except that developers don't want to have to build on top of stilts or as tethered floating structures. It decreases the available pool of customers looking for a pre-packaged vision of what they "should" buy, and it's more expensive than "conventional" building designs.

This illustrates that for some, a preparedness mindset can include thinking for oneself and outside social norms, with the aim of avoiding placing themselves in a situation that calls for preparedness to begin with. Teaching youngsters how to deconstruct the marketing that militates against this kind of mindset to externalize a future cost upon them in order to lift an immediate profit into the commercial entities standing behind those forces, can passively preempt many preparedness scenarios.

They tend to not do very well in cyclones unless the builder has been very careful about tying the stumps to the floor to the walls to the roof.

[1] http://pictures.escapia.com/PTARES/1866960517.jpg

[2] http://www.texasgulfcoastonline.com/News/tabid/86/ctl/Articl...

[3] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14829-invisibility-cl...

They're also supposed to have hurricane-rated glazing. One thing that destroys homes is when an opening gets made, allowing the wind inside. So having strong glass (or boarding-up) is a big deal.

I'm not sure what degree of freedom you're supposing they have, but not everyone is able to uproot their life on some survivalist kick. Plenty of people have their roots and networks where they are, so "just don't live there" isn't a universally applicable "fix".

I've been fortunate enough to be able to move to a place ideally suited to my needs (and as I don't need much I suppose I could move on relatively short notice if needed) but even I recognize that not everyone can afford to follow suit.

Note that he included as an option leaving well before the storm hit. And there was plenty of warning on this storm.

It's not as simple a decision as you're making it out to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Rita#Evacuation_deat...

Probably what should have happened (I'm using my perfect hindsight here..) is they should have told people living in low-lying areas to either go live with relatives or friends who were on high ground, or leave town altogether. And everyone else to stay. This would have prevented the mass exodus that clogged roads during previous storms, but gotten more people to safety.

Despite what I said before, I agree it's a really tricky call, especially for authorities considering a mass evacuation, which is often not the best thing. Houston has a lot of people, that changes everything.

The reports I've seen are describing the Houston situation as a 1 in a 1000 year flood. Does it really make sense to avoid a place based on the possibility of such rare events?

All within 12 years. I think we should stop measuring against data from a different global climate.

Calling it a '100 year flood' makes people think 'oh, good, now we shouldn't have one of those for another ~100 years'. In reality, the odds of a flood of the same magnitude occurring next year are exactly the same as they were this year.

Grady (of the Practical Engineering YouTube channel) has a great video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EACkiMRT0pc

(Grady is in the Austin area, so hopefully he hasn't too much 'practical' experience from this storm...)

And the risk may be higher than 1/1000 per year given how much motivation is out there to understate the risk and say that nobody could have seen this coming.

Some bottles of water on the rooftop could allow them to stay a little more comfortable until help arrives.

Because a lot of the times going to your farmland cottage is the best option you have. Especially if you know basic farming, a range of macgyverisk skills and how to genuinely become friendly with anyone. (Pandemics, climate change disasters, local riots, social break downs).

Then you have a thing like war or civil war, where you're best option is fleeing to another country as early as possible. Both to get a head start on the other refugees but more importantly, fast enough to beat the eventual border wall.

Which is really the problem with your "guide". You need three things, knowing when to get out and when to hide. Knowing how to live without being dependent on scavaging/stored food/modern society. Knowing how to get along with other people.

If you're an oddball with a lot of guns, food and what not, people are going to murder you to take your shit or they are going to burn you on a pyre for being weird/unliked/different.

I remember reading a few prepper forums and most members there were more focused on homesteading and preparing for social collapse than a more probable (and manageable) natural disaster or unemployment. The former is more exciting and allows them to escape the everyday drudgeries of life, which is probably why people easily lean in that direction.

btw I skimmed your guide and it seems very thorough, but is also super lengthy. I noticed you clearly broke information into distinct sections--perhaps including and outline with those links at the top may help readability? Thanks for writing this.

I think a better question is to what extent having the skills to forage, hunt, and survive in the woods will improve your life quality/expectancy. Of course that's not going to be your #1 plan most of the time, but that seems orthogonal to the value of having those skills.

Eisenhower said it best: Plans are worthless, but planning is priceless.

The author explores a bunch of real-life disaster/survival stories and gets into the mindset qualities displayed by the individuals who survive vs. those that don't.

Towards the end he lists the 10 major mental attitudes that will greatly contribute to a successful outcome.

It is one of my all-time favorite books, I have read it 10+ times.

[1] http://amzn.to/2vjgGen

The idea being that the process of planning makes you more easily able to react when everything goes to shit. Eg don't treat a plan like a recipe for success.

It's a false dichotomy though to say mindset is the only thing that's important, it's the most important but not a panacea.

Also, it's going to suck if there's a massive/gradual increase in prices of food over 10-50 years plus for people whom haven't stockpiled calories, lipids and protein when it was cheap. That's something that can't be fixed without a little preparation: not going crazy with a bunker and a bunch of crap, just getting the major things right.

Finally, when the food runs out, if you don't have an AR and a defensible homestead, you're gonna be preyed upon by strangers and/or neighbors because that's just human nature.

edit: photo -- http://www.blogto.com/upload/2015/04/20150415-Robarts-Side.j...

The place is a massive, brutalist compound. And the knowledge it contains would be invaluable! Especially for people like me with limited biological or medical knowledge. The practical resources they knowledge would open up would make a massive difference.

That said, I'd probably still carry a proverbial stick.

Anyway, top rate insights.

1400 pages of small print, plenty enough information relative to the time you would have to reference it in an urgent situation.

Slightly more focused on pediatrics, but super useful resource when other literature says "At this point, head to the emergency room or call 911".

Beyond that, there would be a ton of information on mechanics and ecology that I couldn't possibly keep in my head. Books on mycology, and other resources that would help in foraging would allow long walks through the countryside to be feasible. As long as one had some way to transport a small library of such materials!

Neil Strauss (the Rolling Stone writer) wrote Emergency where he documents his tour through prepper-dom. Slight spoiler here, but he ends up coming to the same conclusion you do in your last sentence. He took CERT (community emergency response team) training and that is what he ultimately found to be most satisfying.

@andrewkemendo, can you say more about this? Is there a framework for making that decision based on situation on the ground, etc?

Then on the other hand, if you're in a civil unrest situation outside of your home, moving is better than not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15111919

In scenarios where you're out of municipal water a few days like is happening right now in Houston (Myself and my family have been through Allison, Rita, Ike and now Harvey) then having a water cache for a week is reasonable, though really hard to do, but that's really not what we're talking about.

It really isn't a prepper mentality. It's just how I prefer to live. Quite a bit could happen and my life would remain fairly unchanged.

I don't have these things so much for what people picture as emergencies. I have them because they are pretty necessary to live here. We have fairly high winds and blizzards that mean mains power is not very reliable. We have ice storms that shut things down for a while.

It's a bit of work, but it is enjoyable labor.

I wonder if there are more in garages or more in basements. Hmm.

Definitely an outlier but I would suggest purifying all water you consumer if possible.

But I feel bad for people in places like Las Vegas and much of Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, etc. where foraging for water means death.

I know it's fun to rag on preppers, but in what way is keeping a year of food stocked and rotated through a bad idea? How is having solar panels a bad idea?

Food for a month? Maybe if you live in a region that could easily be cut off in the event of disasters.

Food for a year? Listen, if things turn so badly to shit you need a year of food, food is going to be the least of your worries.

I don't see why this is the case -- saying "doing X is going to be the least of your worries" seems to imply that there are going to be other priorities and "X" will be ignored -- i.e. "charging your phone is going to be the least of your worries." But food... you _need_ food, even if there are other crazy things happening all around you. If that's the case, I can't help thinking it would be better to do the things you CAN do to prepare. One less thing, etc.

Seriously, if the ability to get food to people has been down for a full year, you won't have medicine. You almost certainly won't have fuel, electricity, public order, sanitation, or clean water.

Food for a month doesn't really exist as a need. Either emergency supplies from around the world arrive in less than two weeks, and you are safe, or they don't and you need food for a year.

It's "not a bad idea, just a pointless one" when times are good, and a distraction from better options if something does happen.

But w/e