Household Emergency Preparedness Guide
Northern Utah / Wasatch Front Edition
A free household preparedness framework, from an hours-long outage through a self-sustaining community.
The goal behind all of it: as many households as possible, genuinely ready for the worst, as fast as that's realistically possible. Not someone who stockpiled alone, someone their family and neighbors can actually count on.
Takes about 60 seconds, right now
Do one thing before you keep reading
Pick one person who lives outside your immediate area, a relative, an old friend, anyone. Text them this exact line: "If something happens here, I'll try to reach you first. Can I use you as my check-in contact?" Local phone lines jam in a real disaster; a call or text to someone far away usually still gets through. That's the whole task.
Not Sure Where to Start?
New to this site and not sure how deep to go? Five ways in, pick based on your household's actual situation right now. Curious what the site covers first, instead? See The Five How-To Phases below.
Topics
Already know what you're worried about? Jump straight to it: all 17 categories this site covers, each with its own chapter and hands-on skill guides.
Community
The single biggest factor in how well a household comes through a disaster, in six decades of research, and it costs nothing but a conversation.
Water
The category most households underestimate once they actually count what's stored. Severe dehydration can set in within three days.
Food
Stored calories for right now, real food-producing skill for later: FIFO rotation through backyard poultry and food forests.
Sanitation & Hygiene
Historically the leading cause of death after a disaster isn't the disaster itself, it's disease from contaminated water and unmanaged waste.
Medical Care
An untreated wound turns into a fatal infection about as reliably as unmanaged waste turns a survivable event into an outbreak.
Energy & Heat
Hypothermia can kill in hours, not days, and it doesn't take a blizzard. A cold, powerless house overnight in a Northern Utah winter is enough on its own.
Shelter & Structural Safety
Keeping the structure you're in intact against Northern Utah's dominant hazard, earthquake, where a structural failure is a near-certainty.
Security & Self-Defense
Comparatively rare next to structural risk, but real: keeping people out who intend harm, and knowing how to defend your household if it comes to that.
Communication
Ranked lower than water or medical care since a household can survive days without it, but every other chapter eventually depends on it working.
Access & Functional Needs
The category most likely to decide life or death for one specific household member, because generic advice applies to them the least.
Mental Health
A household can be perfectly stocked with water, food, and medical supplies and still fail if panic, grief, or conflict breaks it down from inside.
Pet Evacuation & Shelter
After Hurricane Katrina, people died trying to go back for pets that shelters wouldn't take. Most public shelters still don't accept them.
Digital Data & Documents
A household can survive a disaster physically intact and still lose everything on paper if it only ever existed in one place.
Economic & Financial
Money doesn't stop mattering during a disaster, it just stops working the normal way, and price gouging spikes predictably right after.
Fitness
The physical capacity that makes every other category actually executable: hauling water, evacuating on foot, staying upright on reduced sleep.
Transportation
A full pantry and a broken-down car in the driveway is still a stranded household. The connective tissue behind every other category's plan.
Post-Disaster Recovery & Rebuilding
The part that comes after: safely returning home, navigating insurance and rebuilding without getting defrauded, and getting back to stable footing.
The Five How-To Phases
This is the map of everything on this site: five phases, roughly in the order a real event actually moves through. They're not a ladder you have to climb one rung at a time, though: Phase 1 is worth building whether or not phases 2 through 5 ever apply to you, and several of the deeper skills under Phase 4 and 5 are just as legitimate to start now as they are a milestone for later.
Phase 1
How to Prepare
Everything worth owning and knowing before anything happens: kits, skills, documents, and a real assessment of where your household actually stands today.
Download PDFPhase 2
How to Not Die
The reflexes and decisions for the moment something is actually happening: earthquake, fire, flood, a direct threat, through the first three hours after.
Download PDFPhase 3
How to Survive Immediately After
From the three-hour mark through the 72-hour mark: real inventory, sanitation, and settling into an actual plan instead of still reacting to the event.
Download PDF The Complete Guides
The complete framework behind each phase above: the topic-organized Preparing section, the step-by-step skill guides, and the full companion manuals, once you've picked a path and want the whole thing in one place.
Everything below is organized in four tiers of increasing duration and self-sufficiency, from an hours-long outage through a self-sustaining community, a different axis than the phases above (see the Glossary for how they relate):
Surviving
Once you're safe, what actually happens next: a companion manual organized by chronology, from the first hour through recovery, not by category.
Download PDFAlso see
Planning and Practice
Practical tools that cut across every phase rather than belonging to just one: rehearsing the emergency decision tree ahead of time, tracking your own progress, knowing exactly what to buy, and your own state's specific risks and laws.
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