Disaster fiction is entertaining and it is a bad planning tool, for a reason that can be stated plainly: it trains you for the rare event and away from the frequent one.
What does fiction get wrong?
Three things consistently. It makes the event permanent, it makes it violent, and it makes the household alone.
Real events are temporary, dull and collective. The power comes back. The road reopens. The neighbours are having the same week you are, and most of them will help if asked. Every one of those three differences changes what a household should own, and the change is not marginal. A kit built for a permanent, violent, solitary scenario has too many weapons and blades in it and not enough medication, documents and cash.
- Permanence. Fiction needs a world that stays broken. Real outages end, and every hour of one is spent waiting rather than fighting.
- Violence. Conflict is what makes a story move. In the events people actually get, the neighbours help and the danger is a dark staircase.
- Isolation. A lone household is dramatic. A real street has an off duty nurse, somebody with a generator, and three people who will lend a saw.
We are not making a moral point about the genre. We are making a budgeting one.
What households actually face
Outages every year, a storm that moves them once a decade, and an illness or injury at a bad moment more often than either.
| Event | Rough frequency for a US household | What it demands | What fiction suggests instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power outage under 24 hours | Most years | Light, a thermometer, one heated room | Nothing, it is too boring to film |
| Outage over three days | Every few years in many regions | Food, water, fuel, routine | A generator and a rifle |
| Boil water notice | Periodically, region dependent | Stored water, one treatment method | A filter marketed for rivers |
| Evacuation | Roughly once a decade, region dependent | Documents, a route, somewhere to go | A bug out location |
| Medical event during any of the above | Common | Prescriptions, a real first aid kit, training | Field surgery |
| Sustained societal collapse | No modern US precedent | Nothing you can usefully buy | The entire premise |
Look at the last column and then at your own kit. If the money went to the right hand side, that is the correction available, and it costs nothing to make because the fix is mostly cheaper than the mistake.
Expert note from Renata Sowell, water and evacuation editor
Ask one question about anything you are about to buy: how many times in the last ten years would this have been used on my street. If the answer is zero and the thing was expensive, buy medication, document copies and water instead. That question has saved households in my county more money than any advice I have given them.
How do you build a plan from your own address?
Use your county’s actual history rather than a national list. It takes an evening and it is the only part of this that is genuinely personal.
- Write down every event that interrupted your household in the last ten years, including the boring ones.
- Note how long each lasted, and what you did not have at the time.
- Rank them by how often they happened, not by how bad they felt.
- Spend the first hundred dollars and the first weekend on the top of that list.
- Only then look at anything further down it.
A household we know did this and discovered that in ten years they had lost power seven times, been under a boil notice twice, and evacuated zero times. They owned a go bag, a water filter designed for backcountry streams and no stored water at all. The correction cost about sixty dollars in jugs and one afternoon, and it addressed nine of the nine events they had actually had.
What is worth keeping from the fiction?
Two habits, both cheap and both genuinely useful outside the story.
- Rehearsal. The instinct to walk through a scenario in advance is correct. Apply it to a February outage rather than to a siege.
- Redundancy in the things that matter. Two ways to get water and two ways to make light is sound engineering. Six ways to start a fire is a hobby.
The rest is worth enjoying and worth keeping out of the shopping list. What the frequent events actually ask for is in what belongs in a 72-hour kit and in the case for a go bag against a stay put bin. The federal starting point for assessing your own local hazards is Ready.gov on knowing your risks.
Expert note from Dan Brackett, founder and former distribution lineman
I spent nine ice storms watching what people actually needed. It was batteries, a thermometer, a way to cook, and somebody checking on the old man at the end of the road. In twenty two years I never once saw the scenario people spend their money preparing for.