A List of Preps

A few years ago, I was mocked for taking prepping seriously. Since then, we've survived an F3 tornado, a wildfire, multiple heat domes, flash floods, and a hurricane that utterly destroyed a city not far from us. Every single time, the danger was closer and more acute than we realized, and we weren't told how bad it was until after.

Earlier this year, things really hit home when we drove straight into a wildfire on the way back from school. It's hard to describe the whiplash we got watching giant clouds of smoke billowing from the mountains, like an erupting volcano, and then turning on the local news, to find hardly any coverage, and no updates.

Across the country, you see the same thing playing out, people killed by natural disasters that their communities were warned about but didn't prepare for, the failure of critical warning systems, and fatally slow responses. All of this plays out against a government that's trying as hard as they can to dismantle the infrastructure we have left, and would rather we keep working through fires and floods...

Even if it kills us.

Even when "the good guys" are in charge, we can often expect minimization and coverups, misinformation, and a defense of the status quo. We can expect political parties to point fingers at each other while often doing little or nothing to help survivors. All of this has only reinforced the need to prep. It's not a liberal thing. It's not a conservative thing. It's a human thing. We prep for ourselves and the ones we care about.

Over the last year, I've researched and written up everything I can find on several topics, from water storage to head protection. Most recently, I've looked into police scanners and updated an essay about fortifying your home against storms. One major thing we did this year was upgrade our sad, wobbly garage door to a windload-rated, impact resistant door that can withstand wind gusts up to 230 mph. The average garage door can only withstand about 20-30 mph. It won't fly apart under harsher conditions, but it's not meant to hold up under much more. These days, given that the garage door is often the first point of failure during a bad storm, that approaches criminal negligence.

Not everyone can do everything, but I'd rather have this information than not.

And I want to share it.

While everyone else spends their time shouting at each other on their favorite apps, some of us are trying to focus on practical things we can do. We can't protect ourselves against everything, but we might as well do what we can.

Here's the list:

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A List of Preps

Police Scanners, Worth It?

How to Fortify Your Home Against Storms

A List of Preps

Jessica Wildfire