I'll go along with the criticism, since the writer seems to admit that list making is Hard, or Tricky Business as he sees it. FEMA faces a host of competing challenges, so anything they produce is a compromise. I do wonder about the 6 lists angle, and would agree, its better to work from an all hazards perspective and maintain a common inventory of emergency supplies in one's kit.

I've had this discussion with sellers of basic emergency kits - why include a flashlight with an incadescent bulb? Why include a battery-operated incadescent bulb flashlight at all? Odds are if you don't use it, the batteries will drain, the bulb may break from simple jiggling in the kit, and the light won't work when you really need it. The answer so far has been cost - incadescent bulbs and battery driven lights are cheap. And if they provide 1 hour of light 50% of the time they're pulled from the kit after a year or more, that's one more hour than a non-prepared person would have. You or I find that minimal and unacceptable, we probably have solar recharged Crees in our kits (or Crees with a good supply of recharegable batteries) - but the battery operated incadescent is a baseline for preparedness. One that I think should be changed, but if you have to factor in a $9-15 flashlight into a $49.95 kit bill of materials, that changes the economics of who will buy the kits and ultimately begin to prepare themselves.

I think the Make a List issue is akin to the same issues that befall outdoor preparedness people, constructing lists of Ten Essentials. Times change, what's essential for one generation is deemed less essential for another - and when a whiz bang technology (usually battery powered) comes along, a contingent emerges to put it on the list. That debate of course is limited by the premise - Ten Essentials. Why Ten? Why not 12, or 14, or 22 as I've seen on at least one Essentials List. How many can even name the 10 Essentials? Is your list the same as taught to today's Boy Scouts, or the Mountaineers? How many can actually name the Ten Commandments for that matter - apart from those who had their catechisms drilled into their backsides as youngsters. My point is we are no more generally aware of what the Essentials are than we are the Commandments for or against Sin, unless someone took an especial interest in our learning them (or their version of them). But I digress -

Have a plan, make a kit - simple instructions. If you have even 20% of the population follow those instructions, you see a tremendous benefit in the event of a disaster, which saves lives and billions of dollars. If you can push up that percentage higher still, more lives and more billions saved - even in the face of the most dire disasters, as we see in Japan. Either way, the actual number of Americans who currently prepare beyond the have a plan, make a kit stage is vanishingly small. You can't show me a more prepared nation than Japan, and still they suffer. Were the US to experience the same disaster, I fear we would suffer more still for our general lack of preparation. But maybe the largest source of casualties and loss will come not from the failure to be prepared (by having a kit, or really comprehensive kits that can sustain your family for a week or more), but from basic decisions on where we live, whether our houses are earth-quake retrofitted, whether we keep heavy or fragile things over our bed steds, whether we are prepared to shut off the gas at the risk of fire, etc. Having at least a malformed FEMA kit - or one of them - might make the difference of life or death in the first hour after a disaster, when turning off one's gas can save your home and your neighbor's too.