Emergency preparedness, plainly explained.
A hazard-by-hazard playbook — start with the go-bag and family plan, then work through the risks your address actually faces.
Disaster preparedness is one of those topics where the official checklists are technically correct and practically unusable — 40 pages, no priorities, aimed at every American and therefore no American in particular. What follows is the opposite. Two guides you can finish this weekend, then a hazard cluster you can work through in the order that matches your exposure.
Not sure what your exposure is? Run your address through our homeowner demo — it returns flood, wildfire, wind, and heat scores plus a 20-year outlook. That tells you which section below to prioritize.
Start here
Two guides every household should have done by the end of the weekend. Everything else builds on these.
Wildfire
In wind-driven fires, useful preparation happens before the day. Harden the structure, clear the space, know when to leave.
Hurricane and flood
Landfall preparation runs on a clock. Days out, hours out, and after the water goes down.
Power and grid
Outages have gotten longer. Food, medical devices, heat, and cold all need a plan.
Buying and insurance
Preparedness starts with where you live and how it's insured.
The three rules that beat any checklist
- Preparation you can do in under 10 minutes on the day is preparation you can rely on. Anything longer, pre-stage it. Wind-driven fires and flash floods do not respect deliberation.
- Two of everything. Two evacuation routes, two destinations, two out-of-area contacts, two ways to charge your phone. The single-point-of-failure plan is not a plan.
- Insurance is preparedness. The most-hardened home on the block still burns down or floods sometimes. The rebuild is what determines whether you stay in the neighborhood — or the state.
Run this on your address.
See your address-level flood, fire, wind, heat, and outage scores — plus a 20-year outlook. No login for the demo.