Emergency Prep Utah

Now is not the time to start wondering how long you can go with out water, food, or utilities. Since you’re a little nervous, you decide to hurry to the grocery store. If you are lucky enough to get there before it has been cleared out, it is going to look like black Friday on the opening hour, hopefully with some semblance of social order still in tact. You load up on what is still available, doing all you can to avoid the now arising confrontations and fights as tensions grow high. You take your cart to the nearest register to find out that they only accept cash. Checks are never good in an emergency and if the power is out, credit card machines are down also. Most people will not have the cash necessary to buy what’s in their cart, and upon being told that they cannot have these items that are now necessary to ensure their survival, they start to justify by saying, "I tried to pay, so I'm just taking it." Before long, this justification evolves to blatent theft.

Before long, looting will be rampant and the shelves will soon be completely empty. At this point, social order is on its way out the door, and these situations only invite more criminal and violent behavior. This will be going on at every grocery store in town. There is no way the local police can handle a social breakdown such as this. Examples: Katrina and Sandy, and these were hurricanes, meaning, those cities had advance notice. Once social order is gone, you do not want to be out on the streets. This is NOT the time to be needing to go to the grocery store. This is NOT the time to be needing to take out a few extra bucks at the bank. This is NOT the time to wonder if Amazon Prime will still make it to your house in 2 days, because it won’t. If you have waited until now to stock up on items that will ensure your short term, and possibly your long-term survival, you’ve waited too long.

The next question is the scary one: Will your preparations be enough to last until help arrives? If you haven’t done anything to prepare for these situations, this would be a scary scenario to be in. And this is just the first hour of a very long (weeks? Maybe even months?) recovery effort.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected. Let's recap: Australian bush fires; Trump Impeachment; Covid-19 Pandemic, Stock Market crashes; Economy shuts down; SLC earthquake (mentioned because that's where I'm from), Murder Hornets make their debut; George Floyd death sparks protests and rioting; BLM movement; West coast fires; Hurricanes and tornados, and an election year. "Can't afford to get prepared" you say? You can't afford not to get prepared!

Current events are giving us plenty of reasons to get prepared. So lets start now. I believe that once you are prepared, you will worry less and take comfort in knowing you are ready for almost anything. After all, we are told that “If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear” (D&C 38:30). I take great comfort in that last statement.

As a volunteer Sandy City Emergency Prep Leader and an avid Emergency Prep enthusiest, I've spent the past few years putting together this easy to follow step by step plan to help you get more prepared. I've taken what I feel are the major preparedness topics and broken them down into two categories: Food Storage and Emergency Preparedness. These two topics are further broken down into individual modules such as 52 weekly food and water storage modules, the home manual (emphasis on organization and awareness), kits (including 72 hr kits, bed kits, car kits, and docs kits), heating, cooking, power, light, shelter, sanitation, waste, health, wellness, hygiene, home security, home preparation, communications, family rally plans, and drills (such as fire, earthquake, etc). I hope this will make the task of getting prepared a little less intimidating. My goal is not to concentrate on the staircase, but on each individual stair, one at a time.