Our team of preparedness professionals has been monitoring current disasters for the last five years and here is a list of common disasters that occur during the month of January:

• Extreme Weather disasters.
• Wildfire disasters.
• Miscellaneous disasters.

So, what are talking about when we mention these general disaster categories?  Let's get more specific about these categories; Extreme weather disasters include situations such as:

• • Brutally, record-setting cold weather.
  • Hurricane force winds.
  • Heavy snow in the U.S.'s midsection and in Europe
  • Impassible road travel trapping travelers in their cars.
  • Raging seas, winds and flooding in coastal U.S. states.

Wildfire disasters include situations such as:

• Gusty winds that flame wildfires forcing evacuations.
• Threats to cities close to a spreading wildfire also forcing evacuations.
• In 2025 10,000 buildings and homes were burned in one wildfire.

Miscellaneous disasters such as:

• Family deaths due to extended cold, winter storms, extreme wind chills.
• Volcanic eruptions in various parts of the world.
• Landslides in the U.S. and various parts of the world.

In addition to these high-profile January disasters, additional disasters that are frequent in January include power outages, pandemic and influenza illnesses, earthquakes, global-warming related disasters, floods and home fires. How do you protect you and your family from these common January disasters?  If you plan to stay home to shelter safely, then be sure to have a shelter in place preparedness plan.  If you are encouraged to, or forced to (by authorities), to evacuate the safety of your home, every family should have an evacuation plan in place.  A wildfire disaster and most of the miscellaneous disasters noted above would require such a preparedness plan.  If you don’t have either one of these two critical plans (shelter in place plan or evacuation plan), then we encourage you to check out the valuable information on our website to learn how to create these plans.   We also have tiny courses that you can complete in 15-20 minutes to show you how to create these plans in detail, step-by-step.  As our website says, “Stay safe – be prepared!”  Lives are at stake!