So we’ve had a wild week of weather recently here in the lower mainland of B.C. The nightly news was filled with breathless reports delivered by beachside correspondents being pounded by wind and rain. If you believed what you were hearing, it was time to stock up on essentials and be prepared to ride out the end of civilization as we know it.

The thing is – nothing really happened except some rain and a bit of wind. I understand the need to raise the alarm when something dangerous is coming down the pipe but c’mon – this was a bit much. I have to admit though, it did spice things up and it made me consider how prepared my family is to deal with potential disasters. If I were to give us a score on how prepared we were/are I would give us a C – not bad but also not really prepared to be without power/water for an extended period of time. I would say we could be comfortable for 3 days – after that things would start to get a bit sketchy. If you think about it 3 days is not very long – and it is conceivable that an outage of that length of time could happen, in fact, it could be much longer considering my area is overdue for the “big one” . Yep, we’re talking earthquakes.

So I was going to make a list of things you need to do to be prepared in the event of a natural disaster but a Google search will turn up literally thousands of sites dedicated to survivalist training – so I’ll give a couple of quick tips

1. Make a plan, this shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes – a good resource for getting started can be found here .
2. Have food and water for 10 days – I know, 10 days seems like a long time but always better to have more than you need (neighbors might need help too)
   1. Foods we keep on hand are large bags of rice, canned soups, canned fish, and large jugs of water (1 liter per person per day)
3. Make copies of all important documents and store them on a flash drive – this way you can grab one item and get out of the house if necessary. (I store all of our family photos on a free cloud service, so they are always safe)

The bottom line is this – take a few minutes to make a plan and hope to never have to use it. For me, this weekend’s storm that never was turned out to be a great reminder that I have a responsibility to plan for my family’s safety and that there is a very real possibility of a disaster occurring at some point in my lifetime that could see us having to rely on ourselves to be self-sufficient.

My vote for the day: Plan ahead, and stay safe and be prepared for (almost) anything.