Two weeks ago the town we live in was hit by a tornado. The estimates were from an EF3 to an EF4. See the video of it here. I lived in Nebraska for a large portion of my life and tornadoes were something we lived with every summer. I've never been this close before. The tornado literally was two blocks from our house. We were very fortunate to only get hail. That is video I took from our house. Anyway, I've always thought about those poor people, I hope they're ok, and glad that isn't us, when disasters strike on a large scale elsewhere. And, I've thought too that I should probably get something together so we're ready in case of..... Well I've never gotten around to it.

Right after the tornado we were out of power, no phone, no tv, no radio. The only way we knew we were out of harm's way was via cell phone and that was sporadic due to either outages or congestion. I was kicking my self over and over for the things we needed but didn't have. Mainly an emergency radio and an operational flashlight. We ended up using a car radio for our information (turn the car on auxiliary, roll the windows down and turn the radio up). We had to search for stuff, not good when time matters. My near term goal (next two weeks) is to get basic preparedness stuff together. Ends up we were without power for 5 days. Fortunately we have family close by to stay with, but owning a generator was looking pretty good. I ended up purchasing an emergency radio from Amazon.

Here's some links to good info:

Emergency Kits
Emergency Lifehacks:Plan Ahead
US Army Survival Manual FM 21-76
Equipped to Survive

And here's a slide show of the tornado damage in our town. We took these pictures as we, with our Church, were helping to clean up the more devastated neighborhoods.