Bluntly put – I care about what happens to my family, and my community. I also care very much about you, your family, your community and anyone else willing to open their eyes to see how fragile our way of life is right now. But there is also a very practical side to my preparedness preaching, life’s trials will happen to us all and some point in our life, so we better be prepared for them.

Yup, that means at some point in everyone’s life, they will need to be prepared to deal with unpleasant situations, maybe even faced with file or death. You will have trials in your life and I want you prepared for them. Or, the situation, the “trial” if you will, will completely run over you. I don’t want that to happen to you or anyone else. Well, at least I don’t want it to happen to those folks that I care about, and I care about you and your family. The bad guys are on their own.

Michael Maloof in an article called “1 catastrophe could take U.S. down, expert warns” talks about there being 15 key elements to our supply chain in the US. He makes the point that if a single one of those key elements is adversely impacted we are done as a country. And do you want to know exactly how much emergency food supply there is in the nation through relief agencies? Approximately two meals for 1% of the entire population. That means 3.2 million people eat for less than a day while 318,000,000 will starve within two weeks. The original 1% will starve a day later. Sobering thought, yes?

So what are these “trials” I referred to earlier?

The “trials” break down into three basic categories; emergencies, disasters, and the dreaded “grid-down” event. I have been in emergency services for almost my entire adult working life in one form or another. I have been on fatal traffic accidents, house fires, huge wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and so much more. I have seen firsthand the difference between people that are prepared and those that aren’t. Trust me, it is better to be prepared. But you know that, or you wouldn’t be reading this book on emergency preparedness.

My experience over the years tells me the basic “categories” of bad events in a person’s life fall into three basic categories to prepare for:

1. Emergencies –

• House Fire
• Injury
• Flu
• Vehicle Accident
• Transportation system interruption
• Heart Attack
• Job Loss/Retirement
• Utility Outage
• Death
• Earthquake

2. Disasters –

• Earthquake
• Wildfire
• Tornado
• Hurricane
• HazMat
• Flood
• Epidemic

3. Grid-Down –

• Pandemic
• Financial/Economic Collapse
• Stock Market Collapse
• War
• EMP Attack
• Martial Law (the ultimate Police State)

Yes, of course you can add more to the list for each category based on your personal experience. You may even want to move a few around from how I have them categorized. That’s OK, now you are thinking about event categorization.

I frequent a website that is a combination of preparedness topics, religious issues, along with some of the strangest conspiracy and other articles that you can imagine. Awhile back a well-intentioned person posted an article that he thought was just a great article full of valuable information. The topic? “G.O.O.D Bag” contents (Get Out Of Dodge bag).

So, being a person that always wants to learn something new, I followed the link and brought up the article. I began to read the list of recommended items and wow, what a moron!

Now, in the article author’s defense I don’t think they had a shred of professional or real-life preparedness experience in their entire life. The list they had made was probably just this long regurgitation of other preparedness lists that they may had found elsewhere on the Internet, They then combined the various lists into their own hybrid list. They said, “this was a bag to take if you only had 10 – 30 minutes before needing to leave your home.”

The problem was pretty obvious, you would have to have at your disposal a large truck pulling a large trailer that would take 12 people to load everything on that list within the designated “10 to 30 minutes.” That could prove to be a pretty big problem; like a “life and death difference” kind of problem.

Why am I being so critical? They are giving out advice that is 100% impractical and potentially fatal. I don’t want you to fall into that dark hole.

I go back to the training I took in September of 2015; Surviving Deadly Contact with Kelly Alwood. In that class Kelly made a great statement that was full of practical advice:

“If you want to learn to be a gunfighter, learn from a person who has been in a gunfight.”

Well, doesn’t that make all the sense in the world? Move that same solid advice into emergency preparedness:

“If you want to be prepared for life’s catastrophic events learn from someone who is an emergency expert and has responded to and lived through many such events.”

Yes, that means someone who has been extensively trained for, responded to, and successfully survived many of life’s catastrophic events. Even more importantly, a person that understands the principles behind successful emergency preparedness. And that is exactly what I intend to do…share my 40+ years of real-life experience with you.

Now, you have just been trained in a basic principle of emergency preparedness – how to correctly identify and place everything from relatively minor to catastrophic events into the three basic categories. Next comes on how to correctly identify the common seven risks/threats to every emergency situation.

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