When making plans for emergency situations there is no way we can predict every eventuality. However, we can make informed decisions about the likelihood of possible events and adjust our emergency preparedness plans and resources to address the more likely scenarios first. Once those are addressed, we can consider addressing the less common scenarios. This mental exercise is where my family began designing our emergency preparedness plans. The first step was to identify the severity of an emergency, followed by the likelihood, and then address what would we need to comfortably address the emergency.
Severity
Let’s discuss severity first. Severity has two factors that are both related in some ways and separate in others.
The first factor is immediate geographic danger—in other words, is there a direct threat (violence, rioting, approaching fire, or natural disaster) to you and your family’s safety if you remain in the same location? This factor is the largest factor to consider when deciding whether you should shelter in place or bug out.
The second factor is likely to be harder to anticipate, and that is how long of a disruption of services are you expecting? Disruption of services can include utilities (power, water, sewer) as well as emergency response (police, fire, medical, rescue) and longer-term services (communications, hospitals, mail, etc.)
When addressing disruptions of services, you can start to gather an idea of likelihoods as well as levels of impact by examining national averages, governmental websites, and product shelf lives.
For instance, the average amount of time any household goes without power in a given year within the United States (U.S.) is six hours. That is an average, which means some homes go with no disruption, but some will experience well more than six hours each year. Additionally, the average length of a boil water order is 24-48 hours and though nationally not tracked, there were over 700 such orders in the U.S. in 2020.
Looking at food, the average U.S. household has no more than a three-day supply of food. Three days is also the estimate of how long, mainly due to hoarding, an urban center’s food supply would last in the face of a serious food supply disruption. Add to this information the shelf life of foods (varies from weeks to decades), fuels (from months to years), and medicines (if not needing refrigeration, often 5-10 years), and you can start to build a rational basis for emergency preparedness planning based on the likelihood of the length of disruption.
To segment the possible bands of service interruptions, I started with grouping disruptions based on length of time. Looking at national frequencies, the likelihood of causes, and impact, I suggest organizing your emergency preparedness plans around the following bands:
- Temporary (one day to a week)
- Intermediate (seven days to a month)
- Long-term (one to six months)
- Permanent (six months or more)
Temporary
Temporary (one to seven days) is the most likely and the easiest and cheapest to plan for. As discussed, boil water orders and short-term power disruptions are relatively common within the U.S. However, disruptions lasting into days occur as well. These disruptions often start with a loss of power due to a storm, natural disaster, or infrastructure failure. As power goes, other services including emergency services, water, sewer, and communications may also be impacted.
Like many Americans, I experienced multiple periods of food disruptions from one to seven days in 2020. Examining 2020 nationally, over 12 million people in separate incidents experienced two or more days of a full power disruption accompanied by reduced access to food, water, and emergency services ranging from New England to the West Coast. Taking these figures into account (not factoring in civil disruptions) the average chance of a temporary disruption is approximately 3-5% in any given year (note: this is a national average and may be higher or lower depending on where you live. For example, the risk is close to 7-8% in Florida with longer average periods of disruption (three days or more) due to known weather risk factors).
Intermediate
Intermediate (seven days to a month) is less likely but requires more planning and resources to prepare for. The causes are likely the same as with a temporary interruption (weather, shortages, infrastructure failure, civil unrest) but will usually affect a much larger area and number of people, making it a larger undertaking to repair and recover the lost services.
Members of my family have lived through three such events, the first due to a hurricane in Puerto Rico with disruptions lasting almost a full month, a severe ice storm in southern Missouri which knocked out all power in below-freezing temperatures for a little over a week, and again in Southern Illinois where a micro-burst storm (a.k.a. a “land hurricane”) took out the power grid of about a quarter of the state as well as blocking many roads with felled trees. In the most recent example, we were grilling out, rationing water, and living by candlelight and flashlights for three weeks.
The general difference between a temporary event and an intermediate event is scale. The intermediate disruption overwhelms the existing repair and emergency services either due to the size of the area affected or multiple problems at multiple sites in the same service area. In the case of the storm in Illinois, little was done by traditional services to restore power or clear roads for the first three days. I spent these days lending a hand with other civilians clearing roads with our chainsaws. On the fourth and fifth days, emergency crews from as far away as Maine, Florida, Texas, and California started to arrive on the scene and make real progress clearing roads, and restoring the infrastructure needed to return the power grid to function. Looking at national averages, the overall chance for such an event impacting you is approximately 1-2% annually.
Long Term
Long-term (one to six months) is unlikely in any given year in the U.S., but we have seen such disruptions in other countries in the last few decades, usually caused by war, severe civil unrest, or extremely severe weather events with no infrastructure support. Similar to intermediate disruptions this may be caused by an even greater scale of the event, with tens of millions impacted over millions. This results in overwhelming the entire nation’s repair services, extending outages into months.
There are also additional potential causes. Numerous sources discuss how fragile the overall U.S. power grid is and the susceptibility to physical attack, cyber sabotage, or solar storms (NASA predicts a potentially nationwide disruptive solar storm is likely within the next 50 years). Additionally, global pandemics (and the under or overreaction to them!) can have wide-ranging impacts on global supply chains. The CDC currently estimates the yearly chance of a new global pandemic of equal or greater impact than the 2020 COVID situation to be 0-3% yearly. Many experts expect this risk factor to increase each year compared to decreasing in the near future. Such an event could also be caused by a global economic collapse (again estimated to be unlikely 0-1% yearly) or simply a combination of multiple smaller (intermediate) events occurring simultaneously across the country.
We have not seen such a disruption in the United States in recent history, but drawing on events in other countries, such events often result in widespread starvation, disease, and rioting. The overall estimated risk is 0-1% yearly, but the needed preparation to be ready for such an event is much greater.
Permanent
Permanent (six months or more) is highly unlikely but is the apocalyptic scenario that often comes to mind when thinking about preparing for the worst. Though the causes of such a disruption may be similar to the other levels, again just more of them co-occurring or impacting at a global level (for example economic collapse or a pandemic with a mortality rate of over 10% with treatment), this level of disruption is just as likely to be caused by additional factors. These factors may include global or prolonged conventional warfare, nuclear or biological warfare, massive global solar flares, asteroid impacts, or even more science-fiction (for now) events such as machine apocalypse.
The issues of starvation, disease, and violence predicted in long-term disruptions are likely to be much worse. A congressional study of such an event predicted 90% fatalities within the U.S. if such a long-term disruption occurred. Such events are unlikely (0% annually based on past trends) but are unknowable. Planning for such long-term interruptions also shifts from preparing to weather the storm while waiting for the restoration to normal, to a plan of becoming fully self-sufficient as previous services may never return.
Summary
Using the categories of Temporary, Intermediate, Long-term, and Permanent to formulate what would be needed for each situation and how likely each scenario is, provides a roadmap for your own emergency preparedness. Each possibility will require different (more) materials and skills to survive comfortably.
Beyond planning for such disruptions, you also need to decide who else you would be willing to support in your network, including those who have not prepared in the event of a longer-term or permanent disruption. Additional factors that need to be considered for each level are your family’s medical needs, sanitation and trash options, potential tools needed, skills processed (and not), as well as adequate supplies of food and clean water.
The goal of this article is to provide you with a road map to provide structure to your plans for emergency preparedness. Each person needs to assess their own level of readiness, what materials, skills, or challenges they may have missed, and how to make a logical plan moving forward. In future articles, I plan to use this framework to discuss what is needed for each level as well as how the impact of the disruption increases at each level of disruption.
