It's a beginning...

Three hurricanes up close and personal, one F5 tornado a few blocks away, some major blizzards, a tsunami that wimped out, an erupting volcano one island over, a couple of minor earthquakes that I slept through, a flood or three, too many tropical storms to count; am I cursed? Probably not.

Moving around as a kid contributed to the variety of natural disasters if not the frequency. The one I have the most practice with is hurricanes. Charlie, Jeanne, Frances, Rita, Katrina, the list goes on.

The day after one of these storms, I was struck by the sight of someone in line for water in a Lexus - ridiculous! I get not being able to handle hurricane prep if you're having trouble with day-to-day survival. But if you can afford a Lexus, you can't pull it together to stash some water in the house? These are foreseeable disasters. Not equally or perfectly predictable, but sooner or later one is coming to you.

When my neighbors were subsisting on peanut butter and canned tuna, friends and family at my house were having duck quesadillas. The joke was that I should write a "hurricane cookbook". There are enough cookbooks in the world, but that started a conversation that I want to use this blog to expand.

There are ways to get through these things with a minimum of discomfort, a minimum of expense and a minimum of risk. Seems like the way to go.

The net has ample "survival" resources and recommendations that people ignore. While I want to touch on survival issues and gather some links to these resources, I want to look at what we can do to do better than surviving, without over reacting (and over spending.) I want to look at why someone with plenty of money and warning wouldn't have bottled water when the storm is bearing down on them. Why we don't prepare for the foreseeable.

I can't claim any particular expertise on the weather, survival, probability, cognitive errors or many other specialties that apply to getting through foreseeable disasters. I can claim to have given it some thought and to have had some practice.