Emergency Supplies – A View from 12,000 Feet

Emergency supplies are on the minds of many these days. I’m one of them. I think it’s important to be prepared, but I also think being prepared in an intelligent manner is essential. Let me overview what I recognize to be three basic ways to plan for emergencies, then in subsequent articles, let me discuss in detail how each approach might help us think through the idea of being prepared. I’ve never been a Boy Scout, but I’m big on being prepared.

Recognizing that not everyone thinks alike, sometimes it’s necessary to approach issues from various angles before ideas take root and make sense. If after reviewing several different perspectives, the ideas don’t take root, then perhaps they’re not meant for implementation by you. So let’s overview three approaches to determining the need for emergency supplies. These aren’t the only methods, but they are three methods that I’m familiar with, and each has some value, if for no other reason than to get us thinking outside our normal “box.”

Rule of Three – the idea here is that we ought to have three ways to provide the resources that we need for daily living. The three ways would encompass normal resources and two backups. This naturally means we’ll focus on redundancy and diversity, but this approach can be excessive in terms of resources.

Essential Activities – looking at emergency preparedness from an essential activity perspective can help us hone in on resources that are necessary to support key activities instead of simply trying to backup everything that we do.

Event Planning – for the analytical among us, this might be more appealing. It’s also a way to continue to narrow the focus on what is essential by first looking at what is reasonably likely to affect us, then centering our plans around those events and circumstances.

What I hope to show in this series is that each approach can work, and each approach has it’s strong points and drawbacks. Planning for emergency supplies is a personal activity, so I’m hoping that we all learn a little something from each method and use what we’ve learned to approach the issue in a manner that we feel comfortable with so we can confidently say that we’re prepared…or confidently say we don’t need to be.

So, with my article next Saturday, let me give an example of using the Rule of Three when planning for emergency supplies around the house. I’ll try to stay with a pattern of an emergency preparedness article each Saturday until I get this series finished.

photo credit

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Clair Schwan isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool prepper, but he’s big on planning because he knows that leads to success more often than not. So, he’s diving in to explore emergency preparedness planning, and he hopes you’ll come along for the ride.