Mental Emergency Preparedness

Tornados are not anything like they say. They say it sounds like a freight train. They say it’s green and menacing. But to be honest, often you don't even know there is a tornado. It's just a loud storm and maybe an alert or siren. Even when a tornado is a few yards from your house, you may not even know it existed until daybreak. It's the next morning after the tornado when everything really starts picking up speed. I started writing about the mental aspects of emergency preparedness after surviving an EF4 tornado that ripped through our community, leaving...

Being mentally prepared for emergencies is not something we talk about very often when we discuss disaster preparedness, but it may be the most important survival skill of all. Physical preparedness (having food and water stored, etc) will keep you nourished, but psychological preparedness is what will help you survive. Sometimes we hear stories of people who have lived through drastic survival situations—the most dramatic example that comes to my mind is Aron Ralston, who cut off his own arm to free himself from a boulder that had pinned him down for 5 ½ days—and we think, I could never...