Disaster Preparedness-on a small scale

In the wake of Katrina especially, more folks are thinking through what they might do if some sort of disaster struck their community... Dean Ing is my go-to guy in that arena. He's the kinda guy who can rehabilitate the pejorated term "survivalist" all by his lonesome with his down-to-earth approach to self-sufficiency. I often recommend his novel, Pulling Through, as a painless way to be introduced to preparing for disaster (while not being caught up in some silly "Chicken Little" soap opera.) If you don't need the fictional sugar to take some preparedness medicine, his OOP book, The Chernobyl Syndrome would fit the bill nicely as a comprehensive overview of small-scale, personal disaster preparedness. The link above is to four amazon.com affiliated selers who each have a copy of the hardback for sale. That's not a lot of availablity, eh? I can tell you that I'm not selling my paperback copy! A good thing about the book is Ing's virtually painless "hobbyist" approach to self-sufficiency/disaster preparedness/survivalism. I think most of the readers of this blog would find his approach fun, if nothing else, and—what the heck!—you'd end up being more prepared to survive a disaster than probably 99% of Americans. (Pulling Through is also available from some private sellers via amazon.com, and The Rackham Files—featuring more in a similar vein— is available from amazon.com and from Baen Books, directly.) [UPDATE: I had read the first two chapters of The Rackham Files in an online preview. Just got the book. Pulling Through is included in it. Oh, and note the books were written in the 1980s (so references to political issues may be out of date) but are nevertheless pretty good disaster relief primers.