
Disasters - luu
https://www.jefftk.com/p/disasters
======
coldtea
> _I 'm guessing below 5%, but I think this level of preparedness would be a
> good goal for most people who can afford it._

I never understood this attitude (very common in the US popular culture for
one), or the same idea about stocking food, utilities, ammo and such, and
taking of to some kind of bunker for emergency scenarios (from a storm, to
"when the government comes", to the zombie apocalypse or similar).

While it's prudent to be prepared as a family, it's even more prudent (and
it's always missing even as a though from such descriptions, posts, etc) to
push and make sure your country/city/community is prepared.

It's the complacent "everyman for themselves" mentality I don't understand.

And with such a mindset, most of these "everyman for themselves" won't last a
day. They'd have their stuff stolen, or even be killed, by people with more
guns and larger teams. That you have guns yourself wont matter much, they'll
have more, or smoke you out, or kill you from afar when you're not aware
they're even watching you, or any other such technique.

If the prevalent idea for making it safe, is going at it alone (as a single
person or family unit), then others will be all for themselves too, and if
they can get ahead by screwing you, they will. Harder for them to do so when a
community works together and shares their preparations.

~~~
golergka
> It's the complacent "everyman for themselves" mentality I don't understand.

It's a classic prisoner's dilemma game: you don't know what's the winning move
is until you see what others are doing. And this kind of preparation is just
getting ready in case this prep is needed. Hope for the best, prepare for the
worst, and etcetera.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Prisoner's Dilemma posits that you can't talk to the other party. In most real
life situations, you can talk to your neighbors and what not.

I used that fact to good effect during my divorce, which involved no lawyers
and was amicable. So I have first-hand experience with how well it can work to
actually talk to the other party instead of waiting to see what they will do
and reacting, based on an unnecessary assumption that it's _clearly a hostile
situation and we will be enemies._

~~~
golergka
> you can talk to your neighbors

There's over a thousand people living in my building, and a lot more in just a
few hundred meters around me. I have very similar experience with my divorce,
but I don't think I would be able to effectively communicate with this
community, or to trust all these random people.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Sorry, I can't really relate. I'm dirt poor. I attend public meetings and do
pro bono work trying to help make my community healthier and better.

I don't think I need to personally speak individually with the thousands who
live in my town to do something constructive or to effectively communicate
with people around me.

------
DoreenMichele
I don't know. It seems to me like we keep getting better at making the system
more resilient. Disasters seem to be less problematic now than when I was a
child. Even regional disasters get aid brought in on a scale that simply
wasn't possible when I was a child.

As an adult, I've witnessed disasters routinely get remedied quicker, better
etc than predicted. And we are incredibly _meh_ about it.

Y2K was supposed to be a global financial disaster. It gets remembered like
"Ha! Can you imagine those dummies stocked their basements with 5 years of
flour like this was supposed to be a disaster?!"

When Iraq set Kuwaiti oil wells on fire, it was predicted that they would burn
for years and be a global environmental disaster. Instead, crack teams from
around the world converged on the country and invented new techniques to
resolve it. They were all out in six months, with essentially no fanfare for
this miracle.

Afterwards, the desert bloomed from the combination of fertilizer (soot from
the fires) and water (from putting them out) like no one had seen in twenty
years. That was also given no fanfare.

I'm in no position to do disaster prep. My life is an ongoing disaster and
crisis management is all I can arrange for myself currently. But I also mostly
just don't really see unmitigated disasters in the news of the sort that were
the norm in my childhood.

Instead, I often see "Disaster In The News! Prediction: 200k Will Die!!!"
Follow up: "200 people died. Meh. On to more exciting News."

~~~
pjc50
Many of the Arab countries are now in a state of permanent disaster. Something
like three million refugees are now spread across Turkey and Europe. 200k dead
there won't even make the news.

Not something that stockpiling food in the basement would have helped with.

Across the Atlantic, Puerto Rico is in a disaster state again, and the flow of
refugees is from Honduras and Guatemala. Part of the news response is
complaining that not enough of them are dying on the way.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Puerto Rico crossed my mind after I posted. Also, fires in California, a state
I left a bit over two years ago.

So I'm aware there are terrible things that go on in the world that no one
really does anything about. I was openly homeless for years. No one did any
fundraisers to rescue me and I continue to see comments on HN that basically
dismiss homelessness in the US as "just a bunch of junkies and crazies, not a
systemic issue."

I guess I'm more wondering out loud how much it matters to me personally to do
this kind of prep as an American who is no longer in California. The world
currently seems to divide up between disasters that do get mitigated handily
and those where, as you say, some provisions in your basement wouldn't have
protected you.

As noted above, I'm in no position to do disaster prep currently for myself. I
still live hand to mouth.

Yet, I participate in community meetings and try to help make the area I'm in
better in some ways.

I do wish the US had more humane policies for dealing with refugees from
Central and South America. I hate what little I read about that stuff.

But I don't tend to comment on it because I don't really have a solution and I
imagine a real solution would involve interceding at the source -- ie sending
some kind of aid to the countries these refugees are coming from. I don't
imagine that would go over well. I imagine that would get mocked a la "Don't
piss off the US or they will bring _freedom_ to you, too."

Middle of the night half-baked thought kind of wondering how much it matters
to me that I can't currently do this kind of disaster prep. Is it just one
more thing I should be helplessly wringing my hands about and feeling sorry
for myself over? Or is it sufficient that I do what I can to try to be a
resource for my community for issues like homelessness?

My mother grew up in Germany during WW2 and it's aftermath. She never say
still. She was constantly doing something. She only watched TV while ironing.

A lot of what she did involved helping people around her to make their lives
work better. I think she understood something many Americans don't about how
civilized life can come apart at the seams overnight and she invested her time
and energy in saying "Not on my watch, it won't."

I think that's basically where I'm at mentally as well. I participate in
public meetings locally and develop homeless resources online, etc, even
though I am frequently broke because those are things I can do much more
effectively than I can earn an adequate living for myself. Though an adequate
living is probably around the corner, so hopefully I will keep investing in
fostering civility as an antidote or prophylactic to disaster without
continuing to live with ongoing personal crisis myself.

~~~
kragen
When I was living hand to mouth, I found that having some food stored up in my
house was a big help with spending less on food: I succumbed less often to the
temptation to buy convenience food, I could spend less time traveling to buy
groceries, and I could buy what was on sale and buy in bulk, thus decreasing
my costs. If there's any way you can trim your food budget by 5%, you can use
those savings to build up a one-week stockpile in the next six months.

But maybe my endpoint was your starting point, since you were trained by your
mother, and maybe you're already a black-belt tightwad I'm foolishly
mansplaining to. But hopefully my comment will be useful to someone.

Living hand to rent is in my experience more difficult, and of course there's
not that much food you can stock up in a tent on the King Street sidewalk.

~~~
DoreenMichele
The food situation is complicated by medical stuff that significantly impacts
dietary choices. That's not something I know how to succinctly explain.
Suffice it to say that what may look like "foolish, expensive" food choices
for a poor person are often the dirt cheap answer, healthwise.

I was homeless for nearly six years. I got into a room initially where cooking
wasn't going to work and then we moved to a room last summer where cooking a
bit does work, but the fridge died our second day here.

So for over a year, we had a fridge but no means to cook and then for several
months now we've had the means to cook but no fridge. This meant that whether
we got takeout or cooked, food had to be purchased just prior to having a
meal.

I'm trying to be philosophical about the whole thing and view it as An
Experience, among other things.

When the tax refund gets here, we plan to upgrade to a larger George Foreman
grill (our limited means to cook is a too small grill) and buy a working
fridge. That should make the logistics of my life work substantially better,
including making it possible to do a little stocking up, and start easing some
of the financial pressure.

~~~
kragen
Yeah, everyone's circumstances are different, and it's hard to tell from the
outside. Are you on a meat-only diet?

I sort of also don't have a fridge at the moment, as it happens. The things
I've found store most easily are small pieces of dried plants: mung beans,
rice, yerba mate, flour, peanuts, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, texturized
vegetable protein, sugar, dry minced garlic, dried onion flakes, black-eyed
peas, tiny noodles, polenta, that kind of thing. I usually store them in
cleaned plastic coke bottles, which are beetle-proof but not mouse-proof;
details are in Dercuano if you're interested. Storing meat is considerably
dodgier, since without refrigeration, it pretty much has to be canned (heavy
and expensive) unless you preserve it with really aggressive chemicals, like
traditional hams and sausages. Yogurt-making can sometimes help both to
stretch milk out for longer and to help with certain medical stuff, like
lactose intolerance and some intestinal microbiome problems. But maybe not
your medical stuff, since I have no idea what it is.

For people who can eat them, fresh fruit and vegetables are often much cheaper
and healthier than other options, but you have to really keep on top of them
if you or your neighbors are sensitive to decay. It doesn't take long for a
perfectly delicious orange to turn into a fly-breeding ball of mold,
especially in a hot climate.

In case somebody else reading this is facing the "no stove" problem, well, the
apartment where I woke up today had the gas cut off for a while, so a few
times I cooked dinner here on a "penny stove" built to Mark Jurey's design.
It's fiddly, and the smell of partly burned alcohol is unappetizing, but it's
easy to improvise from garbage in any urban area. You can use it if you can
get liquid fuel and if you aren't at too much risk of burning down the house
or being kicked out of it for trying to cook. It can run on alcohol, which is
a pretty low-risk liquid fuel, since it's nontoxic and you can put out alcohol
fires with just water. Butane stoves that run off butane cylinders can also be
an option, but storing butane cylinders indoors makes me nervous. And truck
stops still sell dirt-cheap immersion electrical heaters with which you can
boil a cup, a bowl, a thermos, or a pot of water without any fire, at least,
if you remember to unplug the heater before you take it out of the water. They
do pose a nonzero risk of serious electrical shock. Electric teakettles can be
a safer and more convenient way to do a subset of this; for example, at the
moment, I'm munching on a bowl of Maruchan ramen cooked by pouring boiling
water onto it from an electric teakettle, then soaking for a few minutes under
aluminum foil.

Ziploc omelets are a very-low-effort and tasty way to leverage a boiling pot
or even bowl of water into a reasonable simulation of grilled eggs: eggs,
cheese, maybe some vegetables, and seasonings in a sealed ziploc bag cooks the
eggs quite nicely into a reasonable simulacrum of an omelet. (Moreover, it's
sterile, though I wouldn't count on that for long.) The company recommends
against it, saying the plastic may not be safe for food contact at high
temperatures.

Just to repeat, these are things that have worked for me, and they aren't
guaranteed to work for anybody else, but it might be valuable information to
somebody.

> _I 'm trying to be philosophical about the whole thing and view it as An
> Experience, among other things._

You're not dead yet, which is more than I can say for many of my friends.
Every day you're still alive is a victory!

~~~
DoreenMichele
No, I'm not on a meat-only diet. You can cook more than just meat on a grill
and we often do.

 _You 're not dead yet, which is more than I can say for many of my friends.
Every day you're still alive is a victory!_

More than you would probably guess, given how deadly my condition is. :)

------
DanAndersen
Very good link. I think a lot of people get intimidated by the idea of
emergency preparedness because it feels like such a big, overwhelming thing to
deal with. One cause of this is perhaps the Hollywood/media image of
"disaster" as a singular extreme event that obliterates the average person
except for a few plucky heroes. In contrast, there's a full spectrum of
severity, and any small amount of preparedness can help.

In case anyone here hasn't seen it before, I'd like to share the article
"Doomsday planning for less crazy folk" [0]. It's a good, sober-headed step-
by-step guide to evaluating one's own threat model and making actionable steps
toward improving one's emergency preparedness -- both small-scale and large-
scale. I have a routine to-do item to re-read one section of this article
every few weeks and think of ways I can make myself more resilient.

[0] [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/)

------
dividedbyzero
There is relatively compact pamphlet by the German government on disaster
preparedness that is aimed at ordinary people with no prepper ambitions and
mostly limits itself to practical advice like a minimal food stockpile and
stocking up on candles. It doesn't try to shame the reader into becoming a
whole different (much more paranoid, completely no-fun) person, which is a
nice change from the usual prepper reading lists. Some parts only apply to
Germany (e.g. how to call for help in an emergency), but most of it should be
relatively widely applicable. They refresh it periodically, the current
revision from fall 2018 is vailable in German[1] and in an English
translation[2] that seems to capture the extremely arid dryness of German
government language even better than the German version, but is still quite
readable.

[1]
[https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BBK/DE/Publikat...](https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BBK/DE/Publikationen/Broschueren_Flyer/Buergerinformationen_A4/Ratgeber_Brosch.pdf?__blob=publicationFile)

[2]
[https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BBK/DE/Publikat...](https://www.bbk.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/BBK/DE/Publikationen/Broschueren_Flyer/Fremdsprach_Publikationen/disasters_alarm_en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile)

------
franciscop
Something I learned while living in Tokyo is that the two major risks here are
not the disasters themselves, but the "side effects" of those:

\- Earthquakes, yes some houses fall down and people die, but in general the
bigger risks is the fires that spread from broken gas pipes and broken water
pipes. Oh, and tsunamis.

\- Typhoons, some people die from a direct hit from flying debris, but it's
normally the floods and earth slides that are the issue and kill most people.

I'm from a quiet calm part of the Mediterranean so I'm not used to this at
all. Many of the cities around there even _moved the rivers_ away from the
cities to avoid floods in heavy rains.

As for prep, I can live 1 week easily in my home (lots of water, enough food).
Which I hope not, but might need those if the coronavirus hits Tokyo as
strongly as China. And I'm thinking of buying some more just in case since
some companies are sending their workers to work from home for 2 weeks.

------
skrebbel
My big beef with disaster prepping is the rabbit hole aspect of it. The
prepper community is _nuts_ , but also remarkably intelligent. Perfectly good
articles like this one are going to keep convincing me that I'm not doing
enough.

Ignorance truly is bliss.

------
michaelt
_> Why don't people plan for potential disasters? [...] even people who do
have more time and money also haven't generally thought through simpler
preparations._

I can't speak for everyone, but despite having money and discretionary time,
my list of priorities has an event horizon entry called "relax and recharge
ready for tomorrow" and very few things below that make much progress.

Should I plan for potential disasters? Sure, it's on my list of priorities,
just after 'do a proper cut to increase my abs definition' and 'get to know my
neighbours well' and just before 'finish that online Spanish course I started'
and 'write down the serial numbers of all my electronic gadgets'

(Of course, I live in the UK. So to me it seems extremely unlikely I'd ever
face the kind of disaster where I'd, for example, need 15 litres of drinking
water.)

------
userium
_Why don 't people plan for potential disasters?_

It's not a high enough priority for them. People might occasionally think
about low likelihood, high impact events. But they rarely make a detailed plan
for how to reduce the risk.

"Risk management" is not just for projects and organizations. If you're a
parent you probably do risk assessments
([https://teamsuccess.io/risk](https://teamsuccess.io/risk)) every day,
without realizing it. And ultimately, just like managers, you too as a parent,
are ultimately responsible for managing risks. :)

~~~
jefftk
(author)

"It's not a high enough priority for them" doesn't get us very far. Why isn't
it a high priority? The post has several guesses ("They don't think disasters
are likely", "It's weird") and I'd be curious what you think?

~~~
userium
In companies, the biggest problem is their "risk culture". Some of these
aspects apply also to individuals and families.

In short, a company "Risk culture" is the sum of the company's "shared values,
beliefs, knowledge, attitudes and understanding about risk, shared by a group
of people with a common intended purpose..." (as described by the Institute of
Risk Management).

------
killjoywashere
Bona fides first, then my posture on this issue. So, first, here's the major
disasters I've been through:

* I was on a ship in 1999 that lost all engines in the middle of the Pacific. Waited 2 days hot and quiet in the sun waiting for repair parts to be airdropped.

* 9/11 (and the response thereto)

* Hurricane Katrina (bought a house in New Orleans 5 weeks before, evacuated; let people we still have never met live in our house because we couldn't go back for a year. They stole nothing.) Went back shortly after, SMS worked.

* Hurricane Rita (no direct impact, but ran a packed-to-gills special needs shelter as a first year medical student -- mainly because ex-military and had accidentally evacuated from Katrina into Rita's path). Ran the shelter with 184 patients, 30 other medical students on shifts, a secretary, and an Open Office spreadsheet. The network worked, but the county's emergency shelter patient tracking software could only do input, no output. And it was to be sent to a central database, but they had never plugged in an ethernet cable, so I guess all the data went to /dev/null. Didn't matter, couldn't read it. When I left, I wiped their system and moved the patient database (i.e. spreadsheet) to their brand new Ubuntu desktop.

* Hurricane Isabel (flooded our basement, lost power for about 48 hours - sump pump no good if no power. Oh ... someone had stolen our generator. Keep those things locked up).

* The 2007 Witch Creek fire (San Diego) burned the house directly behind ours.

* 2011 Southwest blackout in San Diego. In the middle of the blackout I was still able to send an editorial project back to client in Tokyo.

* Fukushima Daichi. Volunteered to deploy for Operation Tomodachi because my brother lived between the reactors and Tokyo. They were happy to send me. Aftershocks for over a month.

* The 2014 Bernardo fire. I watched this one from the Canyon rim before fire fighters arrived, fire planes so low they were below me. Nothing between the fire line and my house except fuel and favorable winds.

* Typhoon Mangkhut (lost power for about 4 days, lots of trees down)

We currently own a generator and we keep some extra bottled water and
batteries on hand. We have UPS units on the router/modem cluster and a couple
others around the house (network usually survives power outages, if you can
connect). I have stabilized gas for the generator. Regularly check the
generator. A couple of hand crank radios just in case. We probably round up a
bit on paper towels and canned goods and dry pasta. We have two propane tanks
for the grill (power outage = time to grill all the meat in the freezer).

Basically, even on a third world island in the middle of the Pacific with the
worst storm in a generation, we didn't run out of fresh water or food, and
nerves were much calmed by the readily available network. I have universally
found network to be more reliable than power.

Could something worse happen? That never occurred to me (like the worst
interpretation what (1) could have been). If it's markedly worse than what
I've had to deal with so far, evacuation is generally the best viable option.
If the situation is so bad that evac is not an option, my experience is that
you're just going to have to deal with it. And, as it turns out, humans are
reasonably good at not dying.

(1) [https://www.kuam.com/story/41500001/initially-thought-to-
be-...](https://www.kuam.com/story/41500001/initially-thought-to-be-meteorite-
mysterious-flash-was-rocket-from-china)

------
divbyzer0
For those behind a corporate firewall like myself:

[https://outline.com/r8KtMw](https://outline.com/r8KtMw)

(I'm not sure this give the entire article)

~~~
jefftk
(author)

Your corporate firewall blocks jefftk.com? Does it say why?

~~~
divbyzer0
URL: www.jefftk.com/p/disasters Category: Personal Websites and Blogs

Powered by FortiGuard.

~~~
skrebbel
Your IT department decided that "blogs" are forbidden? Any clue why?

------
kerkeslager
The flipside of this is: how effective is preparing actually going to be? If
you look at what most preppers are doing, not very.

As an avid hiker and rock climber, when I watch a lot of prepper videos on
YouTube, I find a lot of laughable ideas.

* About 50% of the preppers I see have seemingly no concern for cross-contamination of their water system, and no anti-diarrheals in their med kits to deal with the giardia they aren't preventing.

* Paracord is popular among preppers, but it's pretty unclear why. I've literally never seen a prepper demonstrate hanging a bear bag, which is literally the only reason I've ever used paracord in the wild. Lashing together structures boy-scout-style requires a lot more cord than they are carrying, and having hiked a few thousand miles in my hiking career, I don't think I've ever felt that lashing together a structure was necessary or even worth the effort, despite that being a skill I'm proficient at. The fanciest paracords out there have metal wire (for electricity) and fishing line inside the paracord--maybe it's just me, but I would rather just carry the fishing line separately, and I can't imagine a situation where I have access to electricity and not wire. It's also unclear to me whether any of these preppers actually have any skills as electricians.

* Knives: the number one item I find left behind on trails are these giant Bowie knives. People buy them at an army surplus or sporting goods store, and then a few miles onto the trail they realize their pack is really heavy, and the item that stands out as the most weight with the least usefulness is the 3 pound knife. I carry a CRKT NIAD[1] when rock climbing, and a Snow Peak knife (part of a cutlery set--I think an older version of this[2]). What these knives have in common is that they are extremely light. But what do preppers have? In some cases, the Bowie knives aren't even close to the largest things.

* Guns: while preppers seem unconcerned with the weight of their knives, when it comes to guns, weight suddenly seems to be a concern. To achieve low weight, it seems most preppers are willing to settle for the idea that they're never going to hunt for, or defend themselves from, anything larger than a jackrabbit. Almost all the popular "prepper guns", i.e. this Henry AR7[3] are in caliber .22LR, which beyond being a tiny round, has reliability issues. Of course, there are also preppers who go to the other extreme[4]; if you've got your 9mm handgun, .22LR rifle, 12 gauge shotgun, .308 bolt action, and .223 AR15, I hope you're in your gun bunker when the apocalypse happens, because you're not moving anywhere with a quarter of of a ton of firearms and ammo. Personally, I think fishing would be far more consistent for food, and I don't have the stomach for violence even in self-defense (maybe once, but on a consistent basis?) so I'd probably rather use the weight for carrying a light fishing kit and more food.

I don't mean all of this to come across as super harsh on the prepper
community. If you enjoy collecting this stuff, do it. I'm not criticizing what
anyone does for fun, and it's pretty unlikely that you'll ever have to rely on
this stuff, so there's no real harm. I'm just saying that if my experience in
the outdoors is any indication, a lot of attempts to prepare for life that
doesn't rely on civilization are pretty ineffective.

[1] [https://www.crkt.com/niad.html](https://www.crkt.com/niad.html)

[2]
[https://snowpeak.com/collections/cutlery/products/titanium-f...](https://snowpeak.com/collections/cutlery/products/titanium-
fork-and-spoon-set-sct-002)

[3] [https://www.henryusa.com/rifles/u-s-survival-
ar-7/](https://www.henryusa.com/rifles/u-s-survival-ar-7/)

[4] [https://prepperswill.com/5-guns-every-prepper-should-
own/](https://prepperswill.com/5-guns-every-prepper-should-own/)

~~~
kragen
> _Paracord is popular among preppers, but it 's pretty unclear why_

Rambo cosplay.

More charitably, paracord is a known quantity, and they idolize ex-soldiers,
who are of course familiar with its uses.

If you wanted to maximize strength to weight ratio, you'd be a lot better off
with gel-spun UHMWPE braid, like Dyneema or Spectra, in your pocket; nylon
breaks around 200 MPa, while Dyneema is 3–4 GPa, about 15–20 times stronger.
For the 249-kg load of type-III paracord, you can use 1-mm UHMWPE instead of
4-mm type-III paracord, so you can carry 16 times as much of it by length, or
20 times as much if weight was the limiting factor.

It's not a simple drop-in replacement, though. UHMWPE is much more vulnerable
to ultraviolet degradation, is much more slippery, and is enormously less
stretchy than nylon. Also, it floats in water and melts at a much lower
temperature. These can be disadvantages, but they can also be advantages; for
example, due to the elasticity difference, if the limiting factor is shock
absorption, nylon is vastly superior, but if it's a matter of holding things
in place, UHMWPE is vastly superior.

> _giant Bowie knives_

Yeah. Your choice of a 17-gram Cro-Moly knife with a titanium handle is
clearly more reasonable if your objective is to cut things. But the Bowie
knives fit better into the Rambo cosplay.

In both cases, though, some of what you're seeing is conservatism and
tradition: people are choosing a particular article because it's been used for
three generations and its weaknesses are known. Paracord isn't going to
surprise you by melting when you pull it around a tree branch too fast, and
UHMWPE can totally do that.

~~~
killjoywashere
As a thoroughly non-prepper person in the military who has been through a
number of disasters, I definitely go through paracord enough to consider it a
staple. It's just handy to have some "rope" (1), and paracord is decent at
holding a knot but doesn't take up as much space as "rope" .

(1) I'm in the Navy; I can go on for hours about "rope". I'm using "rope" as a
massive placeholder.

~~~
kerkeslager
I'm curious what you're actually using paracord for? Is it primarily nautical
uses?

Obviously rope is super useful for sailing and rock climbing, but as I said
previously, I've only ever needed cord for hanging bear bags when hiking.

------
jiofih
Oh gosh, the official recommendations from FEMA are massive. I counted 25+
checklists and it includes bullshit such as “protect documents and valuables”
which is great advice for getting killed. Nothing more than expected that most
people will ignore that.

[https://www.ready.gov/](https://www.ready.gov/)

~~~
jefftk
Where are you seeing the advice on protecting documents and valuables that you
think is dangerous? I see: "Important family documents such as copies of
insurance policies, identification and bank account records saved
electronically or in a waterproof, portable container" which seems very
reasonable?

~~~
jiofih
Make a Plan -> Step 4 documents

~~~
jefftk
That links to: [https://www.fema.gov/media-
library/assets/documents/133454](https://www.fema.gov/media-
library/assets/documents/133454)

It primarily talks about documents, but does have a bit at the end about
valuables: "Think about where you store valuable belongings and ways to better
protect these items. If you have valuable items stored in a basement, you may
want to move them to a higher location and put them in waterproof containers
to avoid water damage. Or you may want to keep small items in a
flood/fireproof home safe. You may also want to secure items that are
displayed on shelves or walls if your home may be subject to high winds or
earthquakes."

This also seems pretty sensible to me, and not likely to get you killed?

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CalRobert
A discussion of natural disasters and people's preparedness (or lack thereof),
and reasons for this.

