I’m happy to contribute to this debate.
India is perhaps the poorest example of why I should need emergency gear in Australia and not just because it’s an entirely different country. I was in India last year, spent a month there riding a motorbike through the Himalayas. Sub zero temps, ice, snow, mud, river crossings. Did I prep for that? Yep, I paid for a support van full of tools, water, beer, and food. Done deal. That’s all I needed. I didn’t need fire starters, water tablets, or any of that. I spent 2 weeks in Delhi too, power outages were common and expected. They have generators everywhere. If I needed anything I could pay a kid $1 to go get it for me. Anything was within an arm’s reach. They had some of the best guavas I’ve ever tasted there, pretty shit pizza, and forget about cleanliness. No matter what happens to the infrastructure in India, you can bet that there is someone within 10m who can offer you a solution if you pay them, and if not, there is someone within 20m who can take you to a solution.
But anyway, I don’t live there. Where I live, the longest my power has ever been out is 5 hours and I didn’t die of thirst, have a burning desire for a torch, or start to starve. The worst storm i’ve encountered in my life was hail that smashed the tiles on my roof - this was 20 years ago. It was cold, there was hail in my kitchen, but I stepped over it to reach the fridge. My water supply has never been contaminated, ever. My water has been safe to drink straight from the tap since forever. Roads have been flooded once or twice but you just pull over and relax until its gone. With infrastructure downtime of .00001%, I very well can rely on it.
This is my life, and the life of the majority of people in my city. I and my parents have lived like this for decades without issue. If you are telling me I still need these emergency supplies, then I respectfully tell you that you need to understand the principles of risk management. In short, _I don’t need to make preparations for an event that is extremely extremely unlikely to happen. You should focus more on risks that are more likely to happen.
Now Dave, you find it within yourself that you should prepare for these emergencies by prepping emergency bags, and I completely respect that because I don’t know your lifestyle. Please allow me to respectfully ask you a question. Have you prepared for the most likely scenarios which will kill you? Do you know what those scenarios are? It’s not natural disaster, flood, or any of that. More than half of deaths in America are from lifestyle diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancer. The top killers of Americans are things which can not be prevented by emergency gear. When a child is born, it’s basically a coin toss on whether or not it will die from health complications. Preventing these things should be your daily focus.
Even in the worst natural disaster/city meltdown possible, you are of no worth to anyone around you if you aren’t healthy enough to help yourself because you’ve got a diseased body.