The Weather Zombie Survival Guide
Eight hazards, what to do about each, and the misconception that gets people killed in every one of them.
Most preparedness advice is a list of things to buy. This is a list of things to know — organised by what is happening to you rather than by what is in the cupboard. Every figure here comes from the National Weather Service, FEMA, the CDC or the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and each section ends with the belief that most reliably kills people in that particular emergency.
If you want the kit list instead, that is the Survival Kit. If you want it organised by resource — shelter, water, power, travel — that is the Weather Apocalypse Survival Guide.
The eight
Take it with you
The whole guide as a PDF — fifteen pages, no account needed, and readable when the power and the mobile network are both gone, which is the point at which a website stops being useful.
Download the Survival Guide (PDF)
Generated from this same page, so it carries the same figures and the same sources. Print it and put it somewhere that is not a phone.
The one that applies everywhere
Carbon monoxide
It appears in four of the eight sections because it is what people reach for when the power goes: a generator, a camping stove, a gas oven, a barbecue. It is colourless, odourless, builds faster than an open window clears it, and lingers for hours after the engine stops. Nearly a hundred people a year die in the United States from portable generators alone. Generators go outdoors only, at least twenty feet from the building, with the exhaust pointed away from windows, doors and vents — not in a garage, not in a carport, not on a porch.
Sources: National Weather Service, FEMA, CDC and CPSC. Informational only, and no substitute for what your local emergency services tell you on the day — when officials say go, go.