Ranked by how often it has actually been declared here — and what goes wrong in each, which is almost never the thing people prepared for.
The storm is not the emergency. The outage is.
What kills people afterwards is the generator. Portable generators cause roughly 100 unintentional carbon monoxide deaths a year in the United States, and they cluster in the days after a storm when the power is out. Carbon monoxide is odourless, and by the time you are confused enough to notice, you are too confused to act. Outside, far from the house, never in a garage with the door open.
Source: CPSC
Do this tonight
Find out whether your generator has ever been started. If the answer is no, start it — an untested generator is a heavy paperweight with a full tank of fuel.
People drive into it.
More than half of all flood deaths are vehicle-related. It takes twelve inches of moving water to carry off a small car and eighteen to move a larger one. It is almost never a road you do not know — it is the one you have driven a thousand times, where you cannot see how deep it is or whether the road is still there underneath.
Source: NWS / CDC
Do this tonight
Photograph every room in your house. It takes about eleven minutes and it is your insurance claim. Then move anything irreplaceable off the floor.
The decision has to be made before it looks bad outside.
Surge and erosion move on a clock short enough that by the time the water is visible from the house, the road you would have used is often already cut.
Do this tonight
Identify your route out and a second one that does not cross the same low ground.
Two things kill, and neither is the cold on its own.
Carbon monoxide, when the heat fails and people bring a generator or a grill inside — generators are the single largest source of non-fire CO deaths. And hypothermia, which claims around 1,300 Americans a year. The house going cold is survivable. What people do about it is what is not.
Source: CDC / CPSC
Do this tonight
Find your water shutoff and make sure somebody other than you knows where it is. Frozen pipes do more damage than the cold ever will.
The illness is not the whole emergency.
In June 2020, 41% of US adults had avoided medical care because of COVID concerns — 12% skipped urgent or emergency care and 31% skipped routine care. The households that struggled were the ones with a prescription, a chronic condition or a caregiving duty and no plan for any of them.
Source: CDC MMWR
Do this tonight
Write down every prescription in the house with its dose, and find out how early each one can be refilled.
It is the car and the shovel, not the cold.
About 70% of winter storm deaths happen in automobiles. Roughly 100 more people a year die while shovelling snow, and over half of those are cardiac. The safest thing most households can do in a snowstorm is stay off the road, and stop shovelling before they are tired rather than after.
Source: NOAA / NSSL
Do this tonight
Decide now what would actually make you drive in a snowstorm. Most of the reasons people give themselves at the time do not survive being written down in advance.
