Happy New Year! It's time to ...

change batteries in smoke detectors & carbon monoxide detectors
swap out stored water, if needed
inventory & check the age of emergency food stores
inventory emergency equipment, is it ready to go?
review & update personal emergency plans, to stay or go, & a backup plan.
check communications gear
what kind of Intel do you have for the local, county, state, & national areas around your location? what threats do you face?
is your air handling equipment ready to be used?
are your sewage disposal plans up-to-date & working?

What else needs to be looked over, procured, renewed, revised?

thanks for the reminder.

"change batteries in smoke detectors & carbon monoxide detectors
swap out stored water, if needed
inventory & check the age of emergency food stores
inventory emergency equipment, is it ready to go?
review & update personal emergency plans, to stay or go, & a backup plan."

I always heard smoke detector batteries should be changed every 6 months so I do these at the time changes (which the dates are changing this year BTW).

"check communications gear"

Monthly, recharge batteries, update cell phone roaming codes, etc.

"what kind of Intel do you have for the local, county, state, & national areas around your location?"

I'm trying to find good maps I can print. I want to start with my current location and print up maps in a 500mile radius of the location going in different directions. I'm having a problem finding maps that are scaled the same so I can't copy and paste from one to the other. I want to have one with my location in the center, then another with my location on the left and 500 miles east which covers three states. So I find all kinds of maps per state but they all end up being scaled to fit a printed page and won't fit together. I'm trying to find something scalable such as an svg, pdf, or cad type of program. I've found I can get USGS data so I might just end up finding a program that I can draw based on that data.
My thought is to make maps based on which way I would be bugging out/evacuating. My primary route will be east so I wanted to print a map from my home and east so we could refer to that one map. Then print another going west, another north, etc.
what threats do you face?


"What else needs to be looked over, procured, renewed, revised?"

I used to set calendar reminders to check various gear but have went away from that because I started getting so many reminders popping up. I sat down and made a spreadsheet with weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi annual, and annual tasks. Of course its always being changed/added too as I get new gear and make new procedures.

Something I do at the new year change is make sure I have my backups updated and offiste, maybe do a restore test to another system.