Ask Lemmy

Most posters are talking about what natural disasters they experience and less about preparedness, so I’m going to take the preparedness angle:

1. We have a go bag with medical supplies, very basic survival equipment, and non-perishable food.
2. We have enough non-perishable food at home for my wife and I for about 3 months
3. We have enough water for a week, and lifestraws to use local water supplies after that.
4. We have basic survival things like hand crank chargers/radios, solar batteries, thermal blankets, etc.
5. In the case of man made disaster (nuclear war) we have iodine pills.

My take on survival stuff is to be prepared but not be a prepper. Some folks take this way too far. I feel everyone who builds a bunker and has a years worth of food is going to have someone fall flat on their house and it won’t matter anyway. That being said, I want to have enough to comfortably survive a week-month, and then after that things would be so fucked that all bets are off anyway.

Western Australia. Wildfires. I prepare by slathering myself in bbq sauce.

Got non perishable food for about a week at home.

-40 temperatures every few years. I live in an apartment so I'm not allowed to install a fireplace and can't really make changes to the heating system. Got a heap of candles that could keep a small room above freezing for a day or two.

Excessive amounts of snow. 4WD and can work remotely.

Tornados, sometimes, I guess? I've got a chair on the front porch to watch from, does that count as prepared?

Here in Seattle, the main scary natural disasters are earthquakes. We haven't had a major one since 2001 or so, but supposedly there's a massive one coming relatively soon.

The Salt Lake Valley is expecting "the big one" (earthquake) anytime. There is a greater than 40% chance of a 6.75+ earthquake along the Wasatch fault within the next 50 years. 80% of Utah's population lives along the front including the fault. Because the valley is an old lakebed, that means much of the ground would experience liquefaction. Approximately 140,000 buildings wouldn't be ready for it. It'd be pretty bad. One source, but the best is a government report from years back detailing how bad it could be.

None. Chicago doesn't flood, have earthquakes, get wildfires, get hurricanes, get droughts. Tornados dissipate once they hit the urban heat bubble. It barely even blizzards here, once or twice a year at most.

True, we did burn down once. But now we're very aggressive about fire safety and prevention.

My parents and I live in a rural area on the west coast. It's all about wildfire, baby. (Maybe earthquakes might be a problem but we're far enough inland that we don't usually see any.)

We've had to massively step up our fire break game, to the point of purchasing a larger brush cutter for our tractor to handle it all. Every fence line has a 50ft wide cut on either side and roughly 40 acres around the house itself is cut to bare dirt.

We've limbed all the pine trees near the house up to about 18-20ft off the ground, and taken out a lot of young trees that would provide ladder fuel. Any of the trees within a few hundred feet of our house get watered 3-4 times during the summer to keep their moisture content up.

We have a 250gal, 21hp wildland fire pump that lives on the back of our winter feed truck from May until October. It can spray about 80 feet...
We also maintain an 7500gal swimming pool with the filter pump plumbed up to act as a transfer pump into the fire rig for quick refilling.

Additionally, my dad added two large rain bird sprinklers to the roof of our house that can each dump about 8 gallons a minute of water out from our well, maintaining a wet zone about 20ft around all sides of the house, which has concrete fire-resistant hardiboard siding on it. The well itself is also set up to run from a propane backup generator if the power company cuts service during a fire.

There's really not much else we can do beyond having our critical documents in a briefcase and praying.

It used to be blizzards in the DC area, but with global warming, I haven't seen one since 2016. Hurricanes and tornadoes are rare, but do happen. I suspect hurricanes will become more common. I have rapid "go to bags" and some canned supplies. Generally, with hurricanes you get ample warning. We also have places to go in Appalachia (relatives), so we wouldn't have to shelter.