To the extent you can generalize, 'disasters' are predictable - a period of intense need for 24-72 hours, followed by an interim of arriving aid for up to 72 hours. Then a week of gradually returning to 'normal' - access to food, water, heat, medical assistance restored. Preparing for 3 days without assistance is the norm, although most will tell you 5-7 days is the better metric to prepare for being on your own if the disaster is widespread and serious. And 'normal' is relative, your house may be toast and your roads could still be impassable, but when you have access to sustaining food, water and shelter, you're doing pretty good. If that's what a disaster timeline looks like, how should you plan to spend your time, and how should you parse out your supplies?

CERT gives us a way to spend the first 72+ hours of any disaster - take care of your family, assessing damage, triaging injured, mitigating additional harm by turning off gas and water, dealing with mass casualties and mass displacement, hunkering down until help arrives. Whether you are responding as part of an active trained team or you find yourself the only trained person in your zip code, it makes your interactions fairly predictable. You need to work very hard for up to a week applying what you know about responding to disasters, because frankly it isn't common knowledge out there - but repeated evidence is that most people get the fundamentals of disaster response when they are in the middle of one. It's a community focus - you define a neighborhood and assess the damage, treat the wounded, reach out to centers of response (local fire, police, hospitals), and organize self-care for 3-5 days. If its really bad, yes you'll run out of 4x4s and possibly even clean water. If your daughter has a serious wound you may want to keep enough bandages at home in reserve to change dressings regularly, better yet you want to get her to better assistance as soon as possible. Eventually help arrives, experts take over care issues, water is delivered or restored, people begin to feed the community. Even when that happens, I think my inclination will be to get myself and/or my family away from the disaster area.

In reality I don't think I'll have to share my food supplies with the entire neighborhood - you put out a call for people to re-enter safe structures, and come back with whatever food they can find. That should be enough for people to eat until someone can come with more. For those without homes to re-enter, its a matter of digging deep and feeding them. I probably won't be the center of the food universe, simply because there should be enough to go around from community resources for the expected period of time. I'll make a meal for whoever needs one though. Because after the disaster is over, we'll have a community again, and people will remember what you did and who you did it to.