What this is, what it costs, what happens to your data, and the answers to the awkward ones. If something isn't here, ask us.
A preparedness system rather than a blog. You get your county's actual risk picture — natural hazards, crime, infrastructure, population pressure — and then a set of tools that turn that picture into specific plans: what to store, how much water, which routes, what radio setup, how long your fuel lasts.
It's the working version of The Ultimate Preparedness Framework. The book lays out the method; this site runs it for you with the data already loaded.
After writing my first preparedness book, I wanted to find a way to help people do the things I described in that book. Finding and analyzing data is extremely time consuming and I wanted a way to leverage all the data I had already compiled and make this faster and easier for others to do the same. This site is the result of that goal - I've compiled all the data I can to help make it as easy as possible for preppers to identify the threats they face so that they can become better prepared.
People who want to be ready for realistic, regional events — the storm, the outage, the evacuation, the supply disruption — and who would rather do the work once, properly, than doom-scroll about it.
No (but I'd be appreciative if you do). Every stage of the framework runs on this site as software. The book is for people who want the method on paper, which is worth something when the power is out — but nothing here is locked behind it.
Public, primary sources mostly: FEMA, USGS, NOAA, the FBI's crime statistics, the Census Bureau, the EPA, OpenStreetMap and others — read directly, not scraped from someone's summary. Every figure on the site traces back to real data sources, and they're all listed on the Sources page.
Some, but the US is our focus. The generic tools — water, food, power, heating, comms planning — work anywhere. The location-driven parts (county risk, the threat report, hazard layers, Area Recon) are built on US federal datasets and only cover the United States. Global coverage isn't currently planned.
A lot — with no account at all. Every one of the 91 tools, calculators, planners and simulators; the county threat report and the national risk map; the Sitrep national dashboard; the day's Preparedness Brief; the headline charts in every history tool; Area Recon's infrastructure, hazard and terrain layers (and the major hurricanes and tornadoes); plus every article and the whole Resources library. No card, no trial clock, and nothing deliberately crippled.
We're serious about helping others become better prepared, so we make as much as possible freely available.
A free account is just an email — no card — and it unlocks the full map room in Area Recon: the whole data-layer catalog (220+ demographic, risk, health, agriculture and community layers), the live map layers, the planning tools (draw your operational zones, drop pins, plot routes), and the complete hurricane and tornado record instead of just the majors. It's also the account a membership attaches to.
Depth, reach, and keeping it current:
$5 a month, billed monthly — cancel anytime. Your first month is risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. See membership for the full comparison.
Nothing is wiped and nothing locks. Syncing stops and you go back to being a single-device user; anything you already downloaded for offline use keeps working, it just stops updating. Your plans, ratings and inventories stay on your device either way. We refuse to hold your preparedness hostage, but data sync is one of our larger costs so we tie that to membership.
No. You can use the site anonymously and your work is saved in your browser on that device. A free account (just an email) adds the full Area Recon map room — the whole layer catalog, live layers, the planning tools and the complete storm record — but everything else above is open without one.
There are no ad networks, no analytics SDKs, no social pixels, no session recorders, and no fonts or scripts loaded from anyone else's server — the browser only talks to our domain.
We do count page views on our own server so we can see which tools people actually use. That's a count, not a profile: no cross-site tracking, no advertising identity, and nothing sold or shared. The full statement is on the no-tracking promise page.
On your device by default. Plans, ratings and inventories live in your browser's local storage, and if you never become a member, they never leave the machine.
With a paid membership they also sync between your devices — encrypted on your device before they're sent, so what reaches the server is ciphertext.
All your data is encrypted with a passphrase only you know, before anything is uploaded. We can't read it, can't reset it, and can't hand it to anyone who asks. The trade-off is real and worth stating: lose both the passphrase and the recovery key and the contents are gone permanently.
Only if you tell us, and it stays on your device when you do. Setting a home location feeds the maps and tools locally; ZIP codes typed into the threat report aren't stored. GPS, where you turn it on, is read in the browser and never transmitted.
This same site, installed on your device and running with no internet connection — your maps, your plans, the tools and the library, all stored locally. It installs from the browser rather than an app store. Full explanation here.
Your choice. A typical setup — around 200 miles of awareness with street detail near home — comes to roughly 30 MB of data plus 65 MB of map. Both are measured for your exact selection and shown before anything downloads, along with how long it will take.
Android, Windows, macOS and Linux are all excellent. iPhone and iPad work, with the caveat that iOS limits how much a web app may store and can evict it under pressure — so keep offline areas modest on those devices.
Daniel MacLeod — an engineer, and the author of the book this site is built on. He writes under a pen name deliberately: a preparedness author publishing his own risk assessments, home location and supply planning under his real name would be handing over exactly the information this site teaches you to protect. The method is meant to stand on its own, and every source is cited so it can.
No. It's information and planning tools, not medical, legal, financial or engineering advice, and no risk model can promise what will actually happen where you live. Use judgement, and follow official instructions from local authorities during an actual emergency. See the disclaimer.
It varies by source, because the sources vary. Live feeds — weather alerts, earthquakes, wildfires, disaster declarations — update continuously. Federal datasets like the hazard index or crime statistics update on their publishers' schedules, typically annually. Where a figure has a vintage that matters, we show it.
Please say so — corrections are genuinely welcome, particularly on local data where you know your own county better than a national dataset does. Get in touch.
There's a person on the other end of that form, and questions about what the site does are welcome — not just bug reports.
