Skip to Content

Long and Short Term Disaster, Know the Difference

Long and Short Term Disaster, Know the Difference

SHTFPreparedness may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page.

All across the internet there are swaths of blogs and YouTube Channels with people pushing you to prepare for disaster. Listen, its good. For the most part its good that anyone is paying attention to this because, lord knows, the population of this nation is not worried about disaster preparedness.

All across the internet there are swaths of blogs and YouTube Channels with people pushing you to prepare for disaster.

To shine light on this subject takes effort and an understanding that you will face ridicule. However, we also have to be careful about what we are talking about. There are some pretty serious segments in this emergency readiness business.

Short term wilderness survival is very different from long term urban survival. The tools, tactics and techniques are all very different. You cannot write an article about “Survival” and just hope that it works for everyone.  These things vary.

So lets look at the difference between short term and long term survival. Which are you preparing for?

Short Term

While it might seem extreme, we need only look at recent history to begin to understand what short term disaster looks like. Here is a brief explanation of what a short term disaster looks like from a high level. We could look at this situation as up to a month of interrupted services and resources with the assumption that things like power, water and lights will return.

Long Term

For a long term disaster we are talking about a situation that lasts longer than a month and those essential services are not coming back on. This could mean not for a few months or not ever again. As you can see, its a very different beast than a short term disaster.

Its easy to get certain aspects of preparing for the two mixed up. Obviously we wanna get the short term down first before the long term. The short term is more of a checklist situation where the long term looks like a life changing event.

All across the internet there are swaths of blogs and YouTube Channels with people pushing you to prepare for disaster.