Protecting Your Family Doesn’t Mean Living in Fear — It Means Being Ready.
You already carry auto insurance, home or renter’s insurance, and medical insurance. Preparedness is just that kind of protection — no bunker, no panic, just practical readiness.
Every day, millions of Americans insure their cars and homes.
- Your chances of being in an auto accident at some point in your life: 1 in 5 (approx).
- Your chance that your house will suffer a major fire during your ownership: 1 in 350 (approx).
- Yet how many of us have prepared for a 72-hour power outage, a business-disrupting cyber attack, or a regional supply-chain breakdown?
At Survive & Protect, we believe the same logic behind insurance applies to everyday survival — making sure you’re ready when the unexpected becomes real.
What You’re Already Doing
You protect your family with:
- Auto insurance — because accidents happen.
- Homeowners insurance — because fires, floods, intrusions happen.
- Health insurance — because illness happens.
Preparedness is just another layer:
Because sometimes the risks aren’t covered by insurance — a multi-day outage, a natural disaster, a supply-chain disruption, a cyber ransom incident, or a region-wide evacuation.
What do the numbers tell us?
- In the U.S., there are roughly 6 million car accidents each year.
- Fire departments respond to nearly 370 000 house-fires annually in the U.S.
- Nearly 4 000 power interruptions lasting longer than an hour affect ~ 44 million people per year.
What survival doesn’t mean — and what we believe
We’re not here to sell bunkers and fear-porn.
We’re not about prepping for the zombie apocalypse.
What we are about:
- Common-sense readiness
- Practical gear and strategies you can afford
- Skills you can teach your kids
- Confidence instead of anxiety
So…let’s look at the math…this isn’t fear-mongering or panic…this is common sense…here’s what the math tells us:
When you combine the 20 most serious low-probability, high-impact risks
— nuclear conflict, supervolcano activity, EMP, grid collapse, megadrought, pandemics, cyberattacks —
the math is clear:
There is roughly a 1 in 3 chance every year that at least one such event will unfold somewhere at a scale that overwhelms government response systems.
Over a 10-year period, that probability rises to nearly 99%.
Preparedness isn’t about fear — it’s about math.
🎯 Composite Probability of at least one catastrophic, government-overwhelming event occurring in any given year:
👉 ~32% per year
(roughly 1 in 3 annual chance)
🧨 Composite Probability Over a Longer Timeframe
People understand risk over decades, not per year.
Using the same formula, but 10- and 30-year windows:
10-Year Window
Probability that none occur in 10 years:
0.68^10 ≈ 1.3%
Therefore:
👉 98.7% chance at least one happens in 10 years.
30-Year Window
Probability none occur in 30 years:
0.68^30 ≈ 0.002%
Therefore:
👉 99.998% chance that at least one occurs within 30 years.
How? Why? Check my math…and my references…
| Event | Conservative annual probability | Average time between occurrences | Last known occurrence (year) |
| Global nuclear war | ~0.5%/yr (range often cited ~0.25–2.5%/yr for some nuclear war) ERA Fellowship+3Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists+380,000 Hours+3 | Unknown: the last event was in 1945 | 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki (although contained and not global) (of note…nuclear proliferation had not yet occurred) |
| Supervolcano eruption (VEI-8 class) | ~0.0003%/yr | ~100,000–200,000 yrs globally; Yellowstone caldera-forming ~700,000 yrs Fiveable+3USGS+3USGS+3 | 74,000 BP (Toba); Yellowstone last caldera event ~640,000 BP USGS+2National Science Foundation+2 |
| Large asteroid/comet impact (≥1 km) | ~0.00005%/yr | ~500,000–1,000,000 yrs (1 km class); extinction-class ~100M yrs | 66,000,000 BP (Chicxulub extinction-class) |
| Carrington-level solar storm | ~1%/yr (Carrington-class ~0.7%/yr estimates) EarthSky+1 | ~100–150 yrs (order-of-century event) EarthSky+1 | 1859 Wikipedia |
| Global EMP event (HEMP) | ~0.2%/yr | N/A (human-driven) | Never at global-catastrophic scale (largest HEMP test effects: 1962 “Starfish Prime”) |
| Months-long national grid failure | ~3%/yr | N/A (complex, infrastructure-driven) | Never at U.S. national months-long scale; major regional multi-week: 2017 (Puerto Rico) |
| High-fatality pandemic (>10% IFR) | ~0.5%/yr (upper-bound style estimates see GCR literature) PMC+1 | ~100–200 yrs for “worst-in-century” severity | 1918 (influenza pandemic) (Note: COVID did not trigger severity of >10% IFR) |
| Freshwater system collapse/contamination (regional+) | ~2%/yr | ~10–50 yrs for major regional failures | 2014 (Flint-scale contamination; others since) |
| National-scale cyberattack on infrastructure | ~5%/yr | ~5–10 yrs for truly national-impact attacks | 2021 (Colonial Pipeline-level) |
| Major economic depression / currency crisis | ~2%/yr | ~30–80 yrs for deep global depressions | 2008 (global financial crisis) |
| Global crop failure / multi-breadbasket shock | ~0.1%/yr | ~200–500 yrs for truly global harvest collapse | 1816 (global cooling “year without a summer,” after Tambora 1815) |
| Kessler-syndrome satellite cascade | ~0.05%/yr | N/A (emerging risk; no stable historical rate) | Never |
| Mega-drought across multiple U.S. regions | ~4%/yr | ~20–50 yrs for multi-decade mega-droughts | ~2000–present (ongoing SW U.S. megadrought) |
| Major earthquake hitting dense region | ~1%/yr | ~20–50 yrs globally for megacity-level disruption | 2011 (Tohoku) / 2023 (Turkey-Syria) |
| Regional chemical/industrial mega-disaster | ~0.2%/yr | ~50–100 yrs for Bhopal/Chernobyl-scale | 1984–1986 (Bhopal; Chernobyl) |
| Metro-scale wildfire destroying a city | ~1%/yr | ~10–30 yrs in fire-prone nations | 2023 (Lahaina) / 2018 (Paradise, CA) |
| Sustained civil unrest / breakdown of local order | ~3%/yr | ~10–20 yrs for major national-scale unrest | 2020 (U.S. widescale unrest) |
| Sudden fuel supply collapse (systemic) | ~1%/yr | ~20–50 yrs for national-level shocks | 1973 / 1979 (oil shocks); regional shortages since |
| Bio/Chem terror mass-casualty event | ~0.05%/yr | N/A (human-driven, rare) | 1995 (Tokyo sarin); 2001 (anthrax letters) |
| AI / digital-infrastructure cascade failure | ~2%/yr | N/A (new risk class) | Never at catastrophic scale |
NOTE: BP means “Before Present” which in geology, archaeology, and paleoclimatology is defined as the year 1950. Which…as of the date of this table was 75 years ago.
If you carry insurance, you already believe in preparedness — because you already believe in the math. You insure your car, your home, your health, your income… not because you expect disaster tomorrow, but because the numbers tell you it’s the responsible thing to do. Yet the very events that most directly threaten your ability to protect your family — supply chain failures, infrastructure outages, severe weather disruptions, communication breakdowns, and everyday emergencies — are the ones insurance companies don’t cover. And there’s a reason: the math doesn’t work in their favor. Over a long enough timeline, these events are effectively guaranteed, and if insurance companies had to pay out on them, their losses would be catastrophic. So they don’t offer that protection — because they can’t.
But your family still needs it.
This is where personal accountability begins. Not fear. Not panic. Not waiting for someone else to show up with the solution you assumed was coming. It’s recognizing that some responsibilities cannot be outsourced — not to a company, not to a government, not to anyone but you. Preparedness is simply taking the same logic you already use for insurance and applying it to the areas of life where the risks are higher, the consequences are deeper, and the safety net is thinner. It’s calm, common-sense action to ensure that when the math eventually catches up — and it always does — you have the ability, the readiness, and the confidence to protect the people who are counting on you.
That’s what Survive & Protect is here to help you do.