(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . People Get Ready [1] ['Mother Mags', 'Nanny Ogg', 'Belinda Ridgewood'] Date: 2026-08-13 Warner Brothers Films In early 2005, a woman I used to hang out with on the Lower East Side bought her dream house in New Orleans’ French Quarter. That August, Hurricane Katrina rampaged through the gulf and battered its way inland, killing almost 1,400 people and doing $125 billion dollars in damage ($206 billion in 2026 dollars). My friend lost everything – house, contents of the garage, brand spanking new Harley Davidson – just months after buying the home she hoped she’d grow old in. Less than a year ago, in 2026, a dear friend of mine also bought a house. He was a first-time buyer, treating himself to a forever home after retiring from a long science career at a famous government lab in the Berkeley Hills. When I sent his housewarming gift, I also looked up the fire risk on Wildfire Risk dot Org (https://apps.wildfirerisk.org/explore) and discovered that his new place is in a town with a “very high risk of wildfire” – higher, in fact, than 91% of communities in the United States. This is not a spot where I would buy a new home, but my friend did. In his words, he “just wasn’t thinking” about it. He longed for his own nest, and he was tired after retirement. The path of least resistance was to buy a place in a familiar community despite the terrifying chances of wildfire – chances now elevated because of the climate crisis. In 2005 it didn’t really occur to anyone to check the possibility they’d be visited by death and destruction by climate – even in known “hurricane alley” spots like New Orleans. Hurricanes happened and people knew they might get caught, but the prevailing gestalt was different. You accepted the (smallish) risk, bought insurance, and went about your life. These days, however, there are ways to check your locality for climate-related risks like floods and drought and wildfire, and it seems like a smart thing to do. There are quite a few options for lessening risk now that the climate shit is hitting the fan. But what are they? How to know what to do or where to turn to prepare for the inevitabilities of the heating planet? How do you start? What is frivolous or overly panicky, and what makes sense? Note: this isn’t about “victim shaming.” No one can foresee any one individual natural disaster. And many people have reasons for staying in a tornado or drought or flood prone area – kids, a job they can’t leave, obligations to extended family… the list is long. For so many of us, we live where we live, and we’re stuck. Nevertheless… While the corporate media still isn’t reporting adequately about climate, and the Trump administration is a howling wilderness of anti-science stupidity, across social media and in the misty general zeitgeist awareness seems to be locking in that we are headed for some STUFF. There’s been a shift in the discussion – from not talking about the climate to maybe not mentioning it explicitly, but nevertheless worrying about wildfires and parched fields and weird growing seasons and early blackberries and invasive insects bearing nasty diseases and catastrophic flooding and failed crops and the relentless damned HEAT. It is baldly apparent that something is wrong. It is blindingly obvious that we have an accelerating problem. But what’s the timeline? What do you do NOW? Failing a catastrophic “one fell swoop” incident that wipes out multitudes in an instant, humanity will continue to persist, probably for decades. Life will go on in ways that are broadly recognisable. The heat will get worse. The rain will get heavier. Both floods and wildfires will be more devastating. Crops will fail – but not all of them all at once, and initially in ways we can manage by moving supply chain widgets around, buying from other sources, or releasing from emergency reserves. We’ll run out of stuff, but not everything, and not all at the same time. If there’s no bread, there will be chips, or tortillas, or dried beans. And then maybe a little bread again. Stuttering stops and starts. COVID style interruptions. Daily life won’t break down immediately. There’s enough slack. There are enough reserves and workarounds and air conditioning manufacturers. Life will get grimmer and hotter and stormier and rainier-yet-also-drier and more ecologically depleted and, frankly, more dangerous, but we won’t see a full Mad Max style “collapse” for some time. And that means that WE HAVE TIME to prepare. We HAVE TIME to work on our “units of survival.” We have time to collaborate with neighbors, make plans for the worst, pull our resources together and prep. We have time to move if we can manage it, to grow crops or raise chickens, to stockpile beans and seeds, and do whatever might help cushion the blow in the near term. Even if, like me, you believe that the near term is all we have, isn’t it worth doing everything possible to make the time that remains us less wretched and hungry and painful? I would be remiss if I did not suggest that we also have time to do more. We have a little time to stand up and demand action from our governments, which are after all still intact, still more-or-less functioning, and still replete with our tax dollars that could be leveraged to save lives rather than line politician and lobbyist pockets and make more wars. We have time to go out on national strike. We have time to organise rolling work stoppages. We have time to elect leaders who will make actual changes, not just promise green hopium and nibble around the edges of the problem. We have time to pull down the fossil fuel economy and replace it with something sustainable. We have time to attempt a controlled implosion of the extractive capitalist system, rather than wait, paralysed, until collapse occurs with no intervention and it all rains down on us like Vesuvius pulverising Pompeii. If one million people showed up on the National Mall this November we could stop Washington DC dead in its tracks. We could make demands. We could force change. We could call for accountability, and accept nothing less. But if we are not going to do any of that, and it seems that we are not, then we still have time to make the coming years less dangerous and brutal for ourselves. We have time to make more sensible decisions, if we can. We have time to make plans, to build our knowledge base, and to build local resources like a flood rescue and action team, or a neighborhood wildfire rescue squad, or an HOA-based group of “buddies” for elderly or less mobile members of our community. To tackle our now and future climate each of us has two jobs: preparing for an instance of immediate peril and prepping for long term survival. The first is easiest and most straightforward, and you have probably already done it. Know what’s likely to come up. There are handy websites that show your risk by house number or street or neighborhood. Find out what’s most through least likely to happen to you, then build a plan with that in mind. Climate Check https://climatecheck.com/ Wildfire Risk https://apps.wildfirerisk.org/explore FEMA’s National Risk Index https://www.fema.gov/flood-maps/products-tools/national-risk-index If you’re a home owner you can also speak to your insurance agent. They can help you determine not just risk, but where there might be fillable gaps in your coverage. Find your evacuation route. (Like the nearest exit in an airplane, it might be behind you! Or at least, not where you expected, or on your normal way home.) Contact your county or municipality to see if they have ready-made disaster plans. I found flooding evacuation routes and emergency numbers to call in a trifold flyer on the desk at the library, of all places! But I could simply have called City Hall or the county government offices. Bookmark – and print out – contact information for first responders like the sheriff’s office, EMT, fire and rescue services, the Red Crescent and Red Cross, Catholic Charities, and more. Learn what they provide and under what circumstances. Learn the disaster warning protocols where you live. Personal example: I did not know that the weird little answering machine looking box on a shelf in the farm kitchen was a tornado alert device until it SQUAWKED at us loudly one thundery evening. (It scared the bejabbers out of my husband. 🙂) Now I know and I will pay attention to it. Pack and stage a “go bag” or two. https://www.ready.gov/kit https://www.redcross.org.uk/get-help/prepare-for-emergencies/prepare-an-emergency-kit https://www.westberks.gov.uk/article/40632/Creating-an-Emergency-grab-bag Reach out to your current and future crew. Ask: Where can I stay if I can’t stay at home? Can I tag team with friends, relatives, neighbors – anyone? Are there shelters nearby and how do I access them? Who has a generator – a sump pump – a tornado-secure basement – extra bedrooms – high ground to run to? Can these resources be pooled? Get everybody’s contact information, and not just on your phone. Print this contact list, on paper, like a Luddite. Then stash a copy in your car’s glove box, another in your backpack or purse, and a third in your go bag itself. Email copies to out of town contacts, just in case. (Bonus: getting your list in their email may prompt these folks to think about their own disaster response situation!) That’s a non-exhaustive recap of how to prepare for immediate peril – for a cataclysmic event, but one that is discrete in scope and finite in time. And that’s the easy bit. You plan, you pack a go bag or two, you reach out to neighbors, you get pamphlets from the library, you print out a contact list – and you hope for the best. The second job, preparing for long term survival, will be the subject of my next post here. I am not an expert, but I have read lots of them and I have not just “thoughts,” but some personal experience that drives me to don my project manager hat and, in the words of The Martian, try to “science the shit out of” some of this long term survival stuff. This is where we’ll talk about moving, if you can. And gardening. And storing food. And water purification and electricity generation and how to live without lights or running water, and a lot more. Again – not an expert. But my hope is to provide a jumping off place and a spark to start others working on making a safer place for themselves as we move into the coming storm. Please stay tuned, and be careful out there. I’m also on Substack. As always, my mottos are: Use it up Wear it out Make it do Or do without AAAAAND: Asking did not work. Voting did not work. Marching did not work. Our leaders have failed us. CLIMATE REVOLUTION [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/13/800083233/community/people-get-ready-the-end-is-nigh/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/