Can Your Family Survive An Unplanned Crisis?
When I look at all the news available to me nowadays, I can not get over all the calamities we face, such as natural disasters, mass shootings, and economic turmoil.
I then started to get concerned about the well-being of myself and my family and asked what it would take for my family and myself to survive an unplanned crisis.
A crisis comes in all shapes and sizes. However, with a little proper planning and some common sense thinking, you will be surprised just how easy it is to prepare yourself for a simple yet effective family survival plan.
By starting now, not right before or after the crisis, you can rest assured that you thought things through calmly and are ready for what crosses your path.
Always keep this question in mind:
“What steps would I take to ensure my family’s safety and
security after a crisis or natural disaster?”
Creating A Disaster Plan For My Family
Before any plan is established, understanding the whats and whys of things that can and will come up will help you come to grips on what you will have to plan for.
Let’s imagine that a crisis situation descends on the area where you live, whether it is a natural mother nature type, an industrial disaster, a financial meltdown, or a conflict type disaster.
Depending on what falls into your lap, that disaster in and of itself might not even be the biggest concern or killer. it’s the aftermath that can often do the most damage to an insufficiently prepared population.
Common Killers
Lack of water. This may come as quite a surprise, but thirst is one of the major killers in nearly all disaster scenarios. You can survive three weeks without food. However, only three to four days without water.
Because the water supply is often one of the first things that can get affected in a catastrophe, having access to clean water is incredibly important. And if you do not have access to clean water, you should have a basic knowledge of how to purify the water you do have to have it drinking.
Lack of shelter. Just like we often take water for granted today, we often take protection against the elements for granted. But insufficient protection against weather weakens and kills. And it is not just a matter of obtaining and owning tools to stay warm in the cold or cool in some stifling hot climate situation.
You’ll become more susceptible to the weather elements without staying dry and out of the wind.
You will need to know the hows and whys of using those tools.
Hygiene is another factor we take for granted. However, in a survival scenario, poor hygiene could lead to all sorts of problems to your overall health that could weaken you to a point of no return by affecting your survival odds.
Basic knowledge of maintaining some basic hygiene practices will help you and your family increase those odds.
Violence is the human factor that I consider the scariest part of a developing or ongoing crisis.
As much as we would like to think that an emergency brings out the best in us, our most compassionate selves, it unleashes the beast in some people.
However, more so than making ambiguously moral people bad, disasters bring out the opportunists and give rise to already violent tendencies.
And here is a sobering fact: In Houston Texas when the victims of Hurricane Katrina were sheltered there, homicides went up by 23%.
Nobody woke up that morning expecting they would be ‘refugees’ in an unfamiliar area in a day or so. Many did not think or even believed they would need basic self-defense skills or options to keep themselves alive.
Many had no family survival plan, and the consequences were alarming.
Food Preparedness For An Extended Crisis
What about feeding yourself? What about hunger?
Hunger leaves you weak and makes you more susceptible to viruses and bacteria. But if you had a plan, you would know all about that.
Before it’s too late, you would have prepped for it or considered doing so.
Your family probably won’t be dying from hunger.
That said, when it comes to longer-term disaster situations, food availability does, of course, play an important role.
Faced with long drawn-out disasters, your food preps will run out if supplies expire before the crisis does. And if all you have are beans and rice, you may suffer from palate fatigue and fall prey to illness.
Incorrect prepping kills. That said, it’s not usually incorrect food prepping that is the most immediate killer. The real problem arises when the family’s needs aren’t fully considered.
For example, if you have young children, their needs will differ from yours, and if you don’t prep properly. And don’t forget about those pets of yours.
This goes far beyond food and water and into other aspects such as protection against the elements, first aid, hygiene products, and more.
Additions To Your Survival Planning Checklist
Bug-out scenarios are particularly precarious. Fleeing home means that incorrect prepping becomes all the more dangerous.
Medications Failing to prep medications is a killer in many scenarios that most preppers would not even consider disasters or emergencies. Disasters or emergencies. Even a few days of snowing in can become highly dangerous if you don’t stock your medications and the supply runs low.
Dependency is the deadly cousin of incorrect prepping. In particular, I am talking about dependency on people. Let’s say there is a bug-out scenario, and you are far away and unable to get to your family.is it strong enough to carry the main bug-out bag with the necessary supplies?
What would that mean for them if you were the only one who knew how to use all of those survival supplies?
What if you designed the entire bug-out plan around your specific survival skills?
Your family will be dead in the water without you.
There are some dependencies that you have to accept, of course. An infant will not carry on without you, nor will a weak elderly, or handicapped family member.
Insufficient skills Last but certainly not least, your family might not have the knowledge or capabilities to survive. When you are the lead survivalist in the family, your insufficient skills can lead to dependency.
However, insufficient skills can apply to anyone and do not necessarily mean that some family members are more dependent than others.
Insufficient skills often boil down to not having enough drills and nails.
It is not enough to have the tools; you must know how to use them in emergencies. That will give you the ability AND the confidence to see it through.
Survival Planning for Children
Don’t forget about the little ones. Many smaller children have routines they are used to and will have a massive meltdown when those routines are broken.
Your toddler won’t be able to learn to build a shelter, but he should, for example, be able to fall asleep, eat, and stay relatively quiet in an emergency scenario.
Remember, they will be out of their element, far removed from their comfort zone.
It is going to take extra patience and extra planning to make sure they are well cared for by having everything needed to keep them healthy and occupied.
I hope that was more eye-opening than terrifying, although a little bit of fear is not necessarily a bad thing!
Use this post to make yourself aware of situations that can come to you and your loved ones anytime. It’s not being paranoid. It’s just using common sense.
Nobody wants or usually expects a long-duration crisis to overcome them. However, it happens almost every day to someone somewhere in this country.
Would it give you peace of mind that you did something about that?
Consider A Family Survival Kit
A survival kit is a package of basic tools and supplies prepared in advance to aid survival in an emergency. Civil and military aircraft lifeboats.…Read On…..
