Bona fides first, then my posture on this issue. So, first, here's the major disasters I've been through:

* I was on a ship in 1999 that lost all engines in the middle of the Pacific. Waited 2 days hot and quiet in the sun waiting for repair parts to be airdropped.

* 9/11 (and the response thereto)

* Hurricane Katrina (bought a house in New Orleans 5 weeks before, evacuated; let people we still have never met live in our house because we couldn't go back for a year. They stole nothing.) Went back shortly after, SMS worked.

* Hurricane Rita (no direct impact, but ran a packed-to-gills special needs shelter as a first year medical student -- mainly because ex-military and had accidentally evacuated from Katrina into Rita's path). Ran the shelter with 184 patients, 30 other medical students on shifts, a secretary, and an Open Office spreadsheet. The network worked, but the county's emergency shelter patient tracking software could only do input, no output. And it was to be sent to a central database, but they had never plugged in an ethernet cable, so I guess all the data went to /dev/null. Didn't matter, couldn't read it. When I left, I wiped their system and moved the patient database (i.e. spreadsheet) to their brand new Ubuntu desktop.

* Hurricane Isabel (flooded our basement, lost power for about 48 hours - sump pump no good if no power. Oh ... someone had stolen our generator. Keep those things locked up).

* The 2007 Witch Creek fire (San Diego) burned the house directly behind ours.

* 2011 Southwest blackout in San Diego. In the middle of the blackout I was still able to send an editorial project back to client in Tokyo.

* Fukushima Daichi. Volunteered to deploy for Operation Tomodachi because my brother lived between the reactors and Tokyo. They were happy to send me. Aftershocks for over a month.

* The 2014 Bernardo fire. I watched this one from the Canyon rim before fire fighters arrived, fire planes so low they were below me. Nothing between the fire line and my house except fuel and favorable winds.

* Typhoon Mangkhut (lost power for about 4 days, lots of trees down)

We currently own a generator and we keep some extra bottled water and batteries on hand. We have UPS units on the router/modem cluster and a couple others around the house (network usually survives power outages, if you can connect). I have stabilized gas for the generator. Regularly check the generator. A couple of hand crank radios just in case. We probably round up a bit on paper towels and canned goods and dry pasta. We have two propane tanks for the grill (power outage = time to grill all the meat in the freezer).

Basically, even on a third world island in the middle of the Pacific with the worst storm in a generation, we didn't run out of fresh water or food, and nerves were much calmed by the readily available network. I have universally found network to be more reliable than power.

Could something worse happen? That never occurred to me (like the worst interpretation what (1) could have been). If it's markedly worse than what I've had to deal with so far, evacuation is generally the best viable option. If the situation is so bad that evac is not an option, my experience is that you're just going to have to deal with it. And, as it turns out, humans are reasonably good at not dying.

(1) https://www.kuam.com/story/41500001/initially-thought-to-be-...