There is something incredibly powerful about advance knowledge of an event. If you have an early warning, you can take important preparedness and safety steps before those around you even know there's an issue. You have a better chance of keeping your loved ones safe. You won't drive right into an emergency while it's happening.

Selco has talked about missing his window to leave the city when the SHTF occurred. If he and his family had realized at the time how serious the situation was, his story would be a whole lot different.

There are a few ways to set up your own advance warning system about local and world events using the technology that is practically omnipresent in our modern society.

News alerts

There are all sorts of places where you can sign up for local news alerts. If you are a Google user, you can use Google News set to your location. I used this all over the world while traveling and managed to avoid a number of heated protests and transportation glitches.

There are apps like Google News, AP News, and Fox News that will notify you when something important is going on.  The problem I've found with these is that there are too many notifications. I can't handle my phone constantly pinging at me to let me know about something that isn't actually that important to my survival. You can dabble with your settings but I ended up removing all that stuff from my device.

Local alerts