Aside from the Big One (for which I’ve been meaning to make an emergency kit but keep putting off because reasons), we get really bad wildfires now on the west coast so before every summer I load up my inhaler and nasal spray, then I proceed to not go outside for 3 or 4 weeks because outside air bad. Thanks lungs. Thankfully I don’t live where the fires are normally happening, just in the vicinity. if I did, the above mentioned nonexistent emergency kit could be made fireproof and double up for preparedness.
Droughts and bushfires are the two biggest worries here. We get occasional floods, but those occur more often in surrounding towns where the local councils haven’t done anything in years to clear out the riverbeds.
Earthquakes are the only things I’ve ever had to worry about where I live. The preparation other than basics for any emergency is (hopefully) handled by the construction companies that built my home and the surrounding buildings, since this is California and making buildings earthquake proof is a requirement here. Unless a super quake hits or something. Then I plan to move to the Eastern coast of the state. 😎
-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.
Wildfires and flooding here in northern Ontario. Can’t really prepare for these things… Just pack up and go when needed. Wildfire got real close to town last summer, and MNRF were beginning to setup sprinklers around town, but eventually the fire was taken care of. We were ready to pack up and go if the time came, but luckily never needed to.
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 2001 Nisqually earthquake was also a different mechanism event than the one that can cause a really large earthquake (intraslab vs subduction). The last major subduction earthquake in the region was centuries ago and these earthquakes can exceed Mw9.0. Luckily they are not very frequent but there are indications that Seattle’s due for one.
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.
Heat waves are basically the only serious thing here. There isn’t really much to surviving them for the average person. Stay where it’s cool, stay hydrated, don’t over exert yourself in the heat. All really easy things to do if you have a reasonable amount of security in your life. Most don’t bother except maybe making sure to contact elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives.
Preparation is needed if you’re not financially secure. Maybe you’re homeless, maybe you’re too broke too cool your home, maybe a lot of things. I’ve been there before. To this day I’m still aware of places I can find shelter across the city and how to get to them, with and without public transport, in a hurry.
Mostly the answer is libraries but it depends where you are in the sprawl and how bad the heat wave is. They’re great during business hours but they can close before things cool down. I learned to get really good at loitering in shops and other private places while expending as little as possible without them moving me on.
Also where to get potable drinking water for free, you’ll be surprised how hard it can be to find in a pinch.
Edit: I forgot an underrated and personal favorite method from those days - trains.
Before everything went electronic it was really easy to travel free without the stereotypical methods of fair evading, so you could relax when inspectors were on. I’d find a train with functioning air conditioning on one of the ‘safe’ lines and just ride it for the whole round trip back to the central station then find a new one. Outside of peak hour it would be dead quiet and I could read or sleep in peace, and they go till late.
If you’re curious about the fair evasion method, the old tickets were just small bits of plastic-y cardboard with a magnetic strip on the back. Ticket machines would read the magnetic strip, write to it and mark down a trip in ink on the front of the ticket. If the magnetic strip ever failed they’d still honor the ticket and use the marks on the front to determine how many trips you were owed.
All you had to do was stop it being inked (or remove it). The tolerances on the machines were quite large so you could easily just put a bit of tape on the front and peel it off after to have an unmarked ticket. If you were desperate, you could sometimes rub it off anyway. Then all you needed to do was run a magnet over the magnetic strip or bend the ticket until it was damaged in the right way for a “fresh” but broken ticket. You’d then exchange it as a broken one and have a new ticket. If inspectors ever came around while you had a broken one they’d just tell you to take it in and leave you be.
This way you’d theoretically only ever need to buy one ticket, though it was still advisable to pay when you could or fair evade other ways to avoid become a regular at the service stand. My mother was an alcoholic and my father a deadbeat so this was how I made it to school for years.
I’m sure there is some trick with the new electronic cards but I’ve been fortunate enough to not need to work that out since they came in.
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.
Droughts, hurricanes and theoretically earthquakes. Last actually disastrous earthquake was about 700 years ago though, so I dont worry about those. Last huge hurricane was in 1999. I haven’t really prepared against natural disasters in particular, though I do have some food and water stockpiled.
Mainly we’re at risk from earth quake, flood, and wildfires. In general I keep a good stock of food, water, basic medical supplies and have a plan for evacuating if it come to that. For fire the main thing that is likely to affect me is smoke and I keep materials for making a Corsi-Rosenthal box.
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