Once you have increased your knowledge base and you know how to survive a disaster, it’s time to turn your attention to the three basic human needs: Shelter, Water, and Food.
These elements are listed in this order for a very specific reason. This is the order of importance to your very survival.
How To Survive A Disaster – The First Basic Human Need: Shelter
The first human need for surviving a disaster is a shelter. When disaster strikes, you may not be lucky enough to still have access to your home – or for your house to even still be standing!
You MUST have a way to keep yourself and your family protected from the elements, especially in climates of extreme heat or cold. Lack of shelter is usually the fastest killer of the unprepared. In some places, death from exposure can occur in minutes. Personal development now that leads to personal mental growth is key!
Ideally, you will have access to a portable emergency shelter (click here to read our emergency tent review). But if that’s not the case, then hopefully you really paid attention to those survival guide recommendations we just mentioned, as they teach you how to construct an emergency survival shelter where you will be till the storm has passed.
How To Survive A Disaster – The Second Basic Human Need: Water
Once you have found shelter, the next basic human need that must be addressed is clean water.
Most of us are so used to turning on the faucet and having clean water spill into our sink that we completely take it for granted, without pausing to think about where all of that water comes from, or what we would do if the sink ran dry.
The fact is that the human body can go about 72 hours without water. After that, you die. See also this Disaster Survival Guide.
There are few things that you must do to prepare to survive a disaster when it comes to drinking water.
1. Prepare emergency water storage in your home. You may have seen the big blue barrels of water that the prepared keep in their basements or garages – or perhaps you are already using these. These blue water storage barrels are an efficient and easy way to store emergency water. (click here to see what they look like)
2. Have and know how to use emergency water filters. Let’s face it, no matter how much water you have stored, eventually, it is going to run out, and you are going to have to be able to make your own clean water. Also, it’s pretty hard to carry a 55-gallon barrel of water on your back if you have to “bug out”.
Make sure you have a good water filter in your emergency preparedness kit – because chances are you are going to need it! (click here to see what we consider to be among the best portable water filters). If you don’t have access to clean water, and you don’t know how to create your own, then you won’t survive for long.
3. Having a good portable water filter is nice and all when the wells run dry, but it is really only useful for 1 or 2 people – and even then it will not last forever. But what if you don’t have a filter? Or what if you need more drinking water than one or two filters can make?
If you are going to survive a disaster, then you MUST know how to create large volumes of pure water – especially if you find yourself emerging as the leader of a group of people. When disaster strikes, it is too late to arm yourself with this knowledge – you MUST already have it. only if you have it, you will be able to keep your energies up!
How To Survive A Disaster – The Third Basic Human Need: Food
Now that we have addressed the first two basic human survival needs – shelter and water – we can shift our focus to the third: food.
While food is usually the first thing that people think of when considering how to survive a disaster, it’s actually the least important of the three basic survival needs.
The human body can go 2 weeks or even longer without food. Granted, it is still very important, but you do have some leeway. And if you haven’t had any bad news for a week, things might have gone a little better.
The first thing to do as you prepare to survive a disaster is to be sure that you have enough emergency food storage. You should have enough for at least a 3-month supply for every person in your family (and ideally a 12-month supply). (click here for our emergency food storage checklist)
Of course, you can’t always take large quantities of food with you when you have to bug out, so you should have at least 3 days of light-weight emergency food rations in your “bug out bag” to accommodate.
And finally, you will learn about how to find (as in gather, hunt, or trap) food in a long-term survival situation in many of the urban survival guides that we recommend.
These three basic human needs must be met if you and your family are going to survive a disaster. Ignore any one of the three, and you are asking to be pushing daisies really soon.