Why prepare? Because bad things happen and we are responsible adults. Prepping doesn’t have to mean buying night vision goggles to fight zombies. In fact, you should start with things that are most likely and immediate as opposed to potential threats that could happen further in the future. 

For example, we should probably get a fire extinguisher in our kitchen before we invest in a Geiger counter. Maybe a we should get a living will made before we dig a bunker. We have limited resources and have to prioritize. 

Below are just a few things that could, and many that have, occurred here in the Mid-Ohio Valley. 

Personal / Individual Disasters

Injury

Job loss

Catastrophic disease

Death of the breadwinner

House fire

Natural Disasters

Flood – During the 1997 Ohio River flood, major flooding impacted a total of six states, killing 33 people.

Blizzard – 1993 Storm of the Century – In all, the storm killed 318 people, and caused $2 billion (1993 USD) in damages.

Derecho – June 2012 North American derecho – It resulted in a total of 22 deaths, millions of power outages across the entire affected region, and a damage total of US $2.9 billion

Solar flare – A Perfect Solar Superstorm: The 1859 Carrington Event (Google it) – A Carrington-like event today could wreak havoc on power grids, satellites and wireless communication. In 1972, a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone lines in Illinois, for example. In 1989, a flare blacked out most of Quebec province, cutting power to roughly 6 million people for up to nine hours. In 2005, a solar storm disrupted GPS satellites for 10 minutes.

Pandemic – See 2020

Tornado

Major Storms

Man-made Disasters

Economic collapse – China 1852–70, Weimar Germany in the 1920s, The Great Depression of the 1930s, The Eastern Bloc in the 1980s and 90s, Russian financial crisis of 1998, 1998–2002 Argentine great depression, Zimbabwe economic crisis (2000-present), Venezuela economic crisis (2013–present)

Political unrest – BLM and Antifa Riots

Chemical spill –  2014 Charleston, WV Freedom Industries spill – Following the spill, up to 300,000 residents within nine counties in the Charleston, West Virginia metropolitan area were without access to potable water. The do not use order wasn’t lifted for everyone until 9 days after the spill occurred. People got sick and found chemicals in their water for months afterwards. See timeline under supporting documents here: Residential Tap Water Contamination Following the Freedom Industries Chemical Spill: Perceptions, Water Quality, and Health Impacts | Environmental Science & Technology (acs.org)

Nuclear (plant meltdown, terrorist attack, war) – Fukushima 2011, Chernobyl 1986

Chemical / Biological weapon – Old as mankind, Smallpox, 2001 Anthrax Attacks, “[T]he Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. […] Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese had surrendered.” – Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht, professor of integrative parasitology, Heidelberg University, Germany

Food shortages – See history 

EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse)