Preparedness - 1. An Introduction

I am a fan of prepping.  Yes sometimes that makes me appear strange to others who are not, but hear me out.  I was raised to be self reliant.  My father was a very practical man who could fix just about anything mechanical.  My grandfather was the same with electrical devices and I inherited some of that from both of them.

It should be no surprise that I became and engineer, and have an interest in mechanical and electrical devices.  This has lead me gradually down a path of self reliance and in many way preparedness.

Now some of you are going to have this picture of a guy surrounded by MREs, guns and ammo, but that is  not what I mean by preparedness.  For instance I wrote this post a few years back when living in Georgia and suffering through one of the South’s rare but fierce ice storms.

So what is preparedness if there are no MREs and guns involved?  Well, there might be but that is just one small component of overall preparedness. Your starting point is not to start buying up all the ammo you can find, but rather to determine what the risks are that you face.

I can’t answer that question for you, but I can tell you what my risks are and what I have done to mitigate them, because at its heart, preparedness is risk mitigation.  The first step is to understand that there is a three step process to prepping.

• Determine And understand your risks
• Plan to mitigate each risk factor
• Test your plan

All three steps are equally important and in the next few posts I am going to discuss these steps as the pertain to me, and break down how to mitigate them.