Know what you're
preparing for

The FEMA General Preparedness standard is the official U.S. government baseline for household emergency readiness, as defined by FEMA Ready.gov. It covers both shelter-in-place and evacuation scenarios with a minimum 3-day supply baseline and a recommended 2-week target. This checklist is maintained against the current FEMA guidelines and cannot be modified — it exists so you can measure your readiness against a known, authoritative standard.

A pandemic scenario is unlike most others in this library — the electricity stays on, water runs, and stores remain open. What fails is the availability of goods and the safety of going out to get them. COVID-19 demonstrated that the first threat is behavioral: toilet paper, cleaning products, hand sanitizer, and over-the-counter medications vanish from shelves within days not because anyone needs more than usual, but because everyone goes to get them at the same time. Readiness means minimizing your need to leave, protecting your household from exposure, maintaining enough medication supply to avoid pharmacy runs, and having the supplies and space to care for someone who becomes sick without exposing everyone else.

Most people prepare for the wind. What actually breaks households is what comes after — two weeks without power, no refrigeration, water systems compromised, roads blocked, and gas stations stripped bare. MyPlann's hurricane scenario is built around shelter in place as the default: highways gridlock, fuel disappears before landfall, and households that planned to evacuate often find themselves stuck anyway. Katrina, Sandy, and Ian each demonstrated that the aftermath is the emergency — and that geography changes what that looks like significantly. Your FEMA flood zone and coastal distance shape every recommendation.

Unlike most disasters, a major earthquake gives no warning and strikes an entire community at the same time. Roads may be impassable, utilities severed, and emergency services overwhelmed simultaneously. Gas line ruptures create immediate fire risk. Structural damage may render your home uninhabitable without notice. The first 72 hours after a major quake are almost entirely self-reliant — emergency services will be triaging by severity, not by household need. A household's ability to shelter, provide first aid, communicate, and sustain itself in those critical first days determines outcomes.

A grid-down emergency is the loss of electrical power across a wide area for an extended period. Unlike a typical storm outage, a true grid-down event affects the infrastructure that other infrastructure depends on — meaning systems you do not think of as electric will fail on a delayed timeline. Natural gas pipeline control systems depend on electricity and will likely fail within one to two weeks. Municipal water pressure depends on electric pumping stations and typically holds for several days before dropping. Cell towers run on battery backup and go dark within hours. A grid-down event of meaningful duration requires planning well beyond the standard 72-hour mindset.

A deliberate biological attack differs from a pandemic in critical ways: the agent may be unknown, potentially aerosolized, and capable of rapid spread before detection. Guidance from authorities may be absent or conflicting in the early hours. The primary response is immediate shelter-in-place with air sealing, respiratory protection, and strict decontamination procedures for anyone entering from outside. Water independence becomes important if municipal treatment is compromised. Unlike a natural pandemic, the severity and transmissibility of a weaponized agent cannot be assumed in advance, which changes the depth of protection required.

Civil unrest and societal conflict cover the widest duration spectrum in the scenario library — from the six days of the 1992 Los Angeles riots to the nearly four years of the Sarajevo siege. On day one you cannot tell which you are in. Law enforcement may be absent, overwhelmed, or selectively deployed. Movement outside carries personal safety risk. Supply chains may be disrupted. The defining preparation insight from history is that individual household readiness matters, but community cohesion — knowing your neighbors, building mutual assistance relationships — determines outcomes at the longer end of the spectrum more than any other single factor.

A nuclear war scenario represents an extreme, civilization-altering event. Initial concerns are the blast, heat, and radiation effects of detonations, followed by radioactive fallout, which can be survivable with adequate shelter and timing. The longer-term concern is the collapse of nearly all modern infrastructure and supply chains. This scenario requires the most comprehensive and long-duration preparedness of any event type.

A dirty bomb is not a nuclear weapon — it cannot produce a nuclear explosion. A nuclear plant accident is not a nuclear war. Both involve the release of radioactive material without a nuclear blast, and both share the same immediate response: get inside, close everything, remove outer clothing (which eliminates up to 90% of radioactive material from your body), and shower with soap and water. Distance from the source determines your risk. Potassium iodide tablets protect the thyroid from radioactive iodine, but only if taken before or immediately after exposure — Fukushima distributed them four days too late for most people. The long-term risk is food and water contamination, not direct radiation exposure.

The Zombie Apocalypse scenario is our way of modeling total civilizational collapse — regardless of the fictional cause. If you are prepared for zombies, you are prepared for everything else. This scenario assumes all infrastructure has failed permanently, social order has broken down, and long-term self-sufficiency is the only path forward. It is the maximum preparedness benchmark.

Every household has at least one risk that the standard library doesn't fully capture. If you live in wildfire country, the California or Colorado hills look different than anywhere else in the preparedness calculus — evacuation windows are measured in minutes, not hours, and defensible space matters as much as stored supplies. If you live within a few miles of a chemical plant, a hazmat incident changes the shelter-in-place picture. If you're downstream of a dam, inundation maps tell a different story than a standard flood risk assessment. If you're in a tornado corridor, your shelter-in-place plan starts with knowing which room in your house has no windows and three walls of solid structure. The Custom Scenario lets you define the threat, the duration, the checklist, and the readiness target on your own terms.