Life in the Capital

Be Prepared: It’s Not Just for Boy Scouts Anymore

Photo courtesy of robinvanmourik
‘The gear’
courtesy of ‘robinvanmourik’

As we’ve come out of the frozen tundra of the Snowfecta, we might think “oh thank goodness winter is over and we won’t have to worry about a blizzard for a while.” While you may be right in that regard, we’d be missing the larger point: A lot of people were not prepared to handle this in any way, shape or form.

We witnessed Hipsters who were lined up outside the closed P street Whole Foods almost rioted as if someone had just told them that Fleet Foxes sucked. The shelves in produce aisles city wide were bare. There were major lines at area supermarets. It was so bad we even ran out of condoms. With some of the power outages, people ran out of firewood and burned furniture to stay warm. It as a lot of smart, well-educated people with good paying jobs in a predicament they simply did not plan for.

The old proverb rings true: “He who fails to plan, plans to fail”

So what could people have done to be better prepared for this storm? We gave you some ideas on snow-specific preparation before, but what about things other than snowstorms? Well the good news is there’s things you can do that will let you be prepared for a lot of similar elements in disasters, from losing a job or a water main break all the way up to an earthquake or massive solar storm.

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