The word "prepper" does a lot of damage. It calls up an image, and the image is a person with a bunker and a theory, which lets everyone else conclude that readiness is a personality type rather than a practice.
So here are five things that happened in the United States in 2025. None of them involved collapse. All of them involved ordinary people having a bad week, and each one points at something concrete you can do.
**1. The Eaton Fire, January 7.** A wind-driven fire moved into foothill neighborhoods in Altadena on the evening of January 7. More than 100,000 people evacuated. Nineteen people died and over 9,000 structures were destroyed. Residents left with what they could carry, in winds strong enough to make walking difficult.
*The lesson:* the evacuation window can be shorter than the time it takes to pack. Anything that is not already in a bag will not come with you. This is the entire argument for a go-bag, and it has nothing to do with expecting a fire.
**2. The Palisades Fire, the same day.** A second major fire started hours after the first, in a different part of the county. It grew roughly sixfold in three hours. Twelve people died and more than 6,800 structures were lost.
*The lesson:* emergencies do not queue politely. Two simultaneous events split responders, split traffic, and close the routes you assumed you would use. Have a second way out of your area that does not depend on the main road.
**3. Winter Storm Blair, January 5 and 6.** A coast-to-coast storm dropped over 20 inches on the Wasatch Front and over 15 inches in parts of Kansas and Missouri, then laid ice through the Ohio Valley into the Mid-Atlantic. Around 365,000 customers lost power. States of emergency were declared in Kentucky, Missouri, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey.
*The lesson:* multi-day outages in cold weather are a heat problem before they are a light problem. Know how you will keep one room warm without the furnace, and know it before December.
**4. The highways during that same storm.** Interstates shut down. A pileup closed part of I-70 in eastern Illinois. Kentucky reported 170 crashes and more than 280 stranded motorists in a single stretch.
*The lesson:* the emergency that is statistically most likely to actually happen to you happens in your car, and it happens to people who were only driving twenty minutes. A blanket, water, a light, a charger, and something to eat in the trunk is a thirty-dollar answer to a genuinely dangerous situation.
**5. The Richmond water crisis, the same week.** Storm damage to water distribution facilities left the city without reliable service.
*The lesson:* utilities fail independently of each other. Your plan should not assume that if the lights are on, everything else is fine. Stored water and a treatment method cover a failure most people never think about.
Look at what those five actually ask of you. A packed bag. A second route out. A way to heat one room. A box in the trunk. Some water and a filter.
That is not a bunker. That is a Saturday afternoon and a couple hundred dollars, and it addresses every one of the events above. The people who did those things last January were not predicting anything. They were just not starting from zero when the alert came.
Preparedness is not a belief about the future. It is a small amount of work done in advance so that a bad week stays a bad week instead of becoming something worse. The events are ordinary. That is exactly the point.
If you have not started, start with the car. It is the cheapest one and it is the one you are most likely to use.
