Remember Post-Katrina? Sandy May Also Bring a Huge Prepping Surge

Those of you prepping several years ago in the Hurricane Katrina era may or may not recall how prepping supplies and emergency storage foods went totally out of stock for several months afterward.

FEMA bought everything they could find after Katrina and shipped it all down to the Gulf Coast (and a lot of it went to waste, never to be distributed). No one else could lay hands on storage food or water filters, etc. for weeks and months afterwards.

Then when suppliers did start to get product back out to retailers in volume, the whole prepping industry went into overdrive because the population at large had gotten a wake-up jolt and bought everything in sight as it did come back onto the market--particularly MREs and freeze-dried foods. That subsequent demand surge lasted well over a year and customers were having to wait on average around 6-8 weeks for their orders to deliver during that period.

This post-Sandy situation is beginning to remind me of how things went down in 2005. There are folks still waiting desperately for help. People who are hungry are begging for food. The media is slowly finding the tragic angles. It's getting to be a political issue and fingers are being pointed back and forth.

I don't get the feeling this is of the same scale in terms of human suffering as what Katrina was, so FEMA is probably not going to lay waste to all available inventories of food and preps as they did seven years ago. But what I am beginning to get a sense of is that this is again going to be awakening another large segment of the population out there about how important it is that they take care of their own households before disaster strikes, since clearly you do not want to be waiting for the cavalry to come in to rescue you and yours.

Vic Rantala owns Safecastle, a leading crisis preparedness provider for over 10 years.