When the Dominoes Start Falling
We usually deal with the first level effects of an emergency—the most immediate impact. The flood. The power outage. The layoffs. It’s the thing that makes the news, the part everyone sees. But that first domino is only the beginning of the story.
When the dominoes start falling, you will see second level and third level effects if you’re paying attention, if you’re thinking that deeply. And each level of effect can grow in scope and severity. Being able to understand 2nd and 3rd level effects is important to having a strong preparedness plan.
I watched this play out firsthand. We had a derecho come through—and if you’re not familiar, it’s basically a massive windstorm. Transmission towers were on the ground. Not the wooden poles, the big metal things. We had a week of no power. Everything shut down. The school district shut down. Businesses were shut down. There was nothing open.
Thank God I had a generator. We had a window unit, so we had AC. We were good. But friends that I knew lost all their food in their freezers and refrigerators. So when we came back to work after that week, I had the conversation with them: “You need to get a generator. The generator would have paid for the food you lost. You could have run a little AC unit…”
They didn’t listen. A month later, Hurricane Beryl hit, and the same thing happened again. Same people. Same conversation. Because people are not thinking about second level effects. They’re not taking it to the next consequence of what could happen. This concept needed more attention.
People Miss This About Emergencies
Let me break this down with a real-world example—a major flood in a city. I’m thinking back to Hurricane Harvey when all of Houston was underwater. The first level effects are what everyone sees: flood damages homes, businesses, infrastructure, and transportation. Roads and bridges become impassable. That definitely happened for us here in Houston for many days.
For you personally, this means your home gets flooded and you have to muck it out. You’ve got to get the water out or wait for the water to recede. You’ve got to get out the mud. You need to cut the sheetrock a couple inches above where the floodwaters were. You need to spray the inside of the walls with a solution to kill any bacteria that was in the floodwaters. You might lose your furniture, your clothes, your technology. I know people who lost family heirlooms.
This is the information that’s on the news. This is what everyone sees. But then the emergency continues on, and that’s when things get complicated.
The second level effects start showing up in the days and weeks following. Supply deliveries are disrupted. Stores run out of essentials. Power outages shut down critical services like water treatment plants. Hospitals might be operating on backup power. Gas stations can’t pump fuel. One of my church members—their water treatment plant was not able to come online and it got really bad for them.
For you, this means you might not be able to work. You might not get a paycheck. You might even lose your job. You can’t run your generator like you want because gas stations can’t pump gas. You might lose the food in your freezer. Your worry about the immediate future starts to go up. You start to feel a little bit more panic.
Then come the third level effects—the ones most people stop thinking about entirely. Employment crisis as businesses fail on a bigger scale. Housing shortages because homes were destroyed or condemned. I have a friend whose neighborhood had a house that nobody mucked out—it sat there throwing off mold spores until the county finally came in months later and tore it down to the foundation.
There could be a public health crisis from waterborne diseases. Insurance systems back up with delays in payments—maybe insurance companies go belly up entirely because they have thousands of people who need payouts. Mental health spikes because of all the stress, anxiety, and trauma. The people in my neighborhood who didn’t have generators were starting to lose it after four or five days. They were getting really antsy.
There were people living in their homes two years after Hurricane Harvey with no walls—just studs. They were putting up sheets in the wintertime to stay a little warmer because they didn’t have insurance to fix their homes, so they were fixing them up little by little. That’s a third level effect that most people never consider.
A Simple Question That Changes How You Prep
One of the ways we deal with this is with a very simple strategy: you just ask “what happens next?” That question helps you systematically trace the consequences of any event. Start with the trigger event, define the initial effect. Now for you, where you are, you need to be thinking about what those first level events are that happen in your area.
If you’re not on one of the coasts, you don’t care about hurricanes. If you’re up north, you’re dealing with winter storms. I’m not dealing with winter storms—although I say that and we had Winter Storm Uri and all that. But whatever is very possible where you’re at, start with that first level event.
Then ask: what happens next? Consider the direct consequences—those are your second level effects. Think about it in two different ways: what happens at your city, county, or neighborhood level, and what happens for you specifically. There’s going to be people that are not prepared, but you are prepared. So there’s going to be different consequences that people have to deal with. But if your city or county or neighborhood is dealing with issues, you’re going to be dealing with them as well because you’re just part of it.
After you settle those things down, keep asking yourself that question. What happens next? And because of that, what happens next? It’s just logical thinking—because this happened, then this can happen. We don’t always stop to do this.
What This Looks Like for a Bigger Scenario
Let me walk through another example using one of our bigger dystopian situations: a national economic collapse. I want to imagine the impact on an advanced prepper family—someone like you. You’re a prepper, your spouse is on board, your kids might not be on board but they deal with it. You’ve got food storage, water storage, some security figured out, maybe a generator or some solar panels.
First level effects hit immediately: the stock market crashes and loses 40% of its value in days. The national currency is devalued, causing hyperinflation where prices for basic goods skyrocket overnight. You go to the grocery store and your chips that were $3 are now $8. Banks freeze withdrawals to prevent bank runs, locking customers out of their savings.
For you as a prepper, this means any savings or retirement funds held in the stock market could be immediately wiped out. You lose your cushion for the future. But your two months of food storage becomes one of your most valuable assets while everybody else is worrying about where their next meal comes from. If you’ve kept some cash at home like preppers recommend, you have something to work with when credit cards stop working.
Second level effects show up in days and weeks. Small businesses can’t afford restocking costs or payroll, leading to closures and mass layoffs. The supply chain grinds to a halt because trucking companies aren’t getting paid. Credit freezes—you try to drop your credit card at the grocery store and they say nope, not taking it. People can’t buy food or fuel unless they have physical cash or something to barter.
For your family, you might feel that job loss if anyone was employed by a non-essential business. Your primary income is gone. If you have a generator that depends on fuel and the supply chain is dead, your fuel reserves become finite and irreplaceable. You start using fuel very scarcely, only for the most immediate needs. And you shift from thinking about buying things to protecting things.
Third level effects emerge in months. A barter economy develops where ammunition, alcohol, and medicine replace currency. Social unrest and crime spike because law enforcement budgets are slashed. Property crime and looting becomes a survival necessity for desperate people. Remember that article about the nine days to anarchy? People will go three days with limited food before they start getting antsy, then things go sideways. Neighborhoods start forming defense groups.
There’s a public health crisis because people can’t get medications. I don’t think we talk about that enough—how many people are on anti-anxiety, anti-depression, and psychotropic medications right now. With that supply gone, chronic conditions go untreated. People who need dialysis or insulin aren’t getting it. You start seeing a decrease in life expectancy.
But here’s where being a strategic prepper creates opportunity. If you have extra batteries, some stored fuel, certain medicines, or practical skills that can help people, those things become highly sought after. Bartering becomes a real option. Your knowledge of natural herbs and remedies becomes valuable not just for your family but as a bartering asset. Understanding good sanitation when other people don’t—that’s a skill that matters.
Making This Practical: Your Next Steps
When you start planning this out, be specific about who you’re talking about. It’s pretty easy to think through what might happen out there in society. But everybody is going to be different. What would affect my family might be very different than how you’re going to be affected. Your effects on your city and neighborhood could be the same for everybody, but how it affects you and the groups you’d be responsible for—you need to be thinking about that.
Consider timeframes. What would happen in a day? What would happen in three days? Take a power outage: one day, if you’re well insulated, might not even be a big deal—your home might not warm up much. But three days? Now you’re thinking about losing stuff in your freezer and dealing with heat. Seven days? A couple weeks? A month? A year? What would it look like if it was extended?
I think it would be very helpful if you had a flowchart. Sit down and do a flowchart or a mind map where you can see those connections—because of this, this happens. There’s free software online for mind maps and flowcharts. You could even do it in Word or just with paper and pencil. You might start off with an 8.5×11 sheet, but be ready to move to larger paper because it might grow on you.
Run the chain. Imagine the dominoes falling. Pick a scenario that’s relevant to you, one that could possibly happen, and go three levels deep. Ask yourself: what happens next? Because of this, what happens next? It can get overwhelming because it can get so big and detailed. Go into it with an open mind, but really try to nail down what’s going to affect you the most.
When you do that, you can start auditing your preps. In this situation with first level effects, you might be completely good. You might even be good with second level effects—you might be set for months. Be honest with yourself though. Sometimes we’re like “oh yeah, I’ll be good for a year or two years.” Be honest. Then look at third level effects. Is there one thing you can identify that you haven’t planned for that you can start addressing?
Developing Your Preparedness Spidey Sense
Here’s something you can start doing right now: next time you see something on the news, whether it’s national or local, start thinking in levels of effect. If you hear about mudslides in California, we keep those people in our prayers and call the people we know. But at the same time, in your mind, think: okay, what would that look like for me? Level one, level two, level three effects. Go through it as a mental exercise.
The more you do that, the more you’re able to easily see things. It begins to build over time and you’re able to get through these scenarios a lot faster. You start being able to identify the holes and gaps that you might have.
One of the things I always promote—is the planning side of preparedness. We like talking about the gear, we like talking about the stuff. But a lot of the times, preparedness is thinking through problem solving before things happen. We want to be prepared before things go sideways.
If you can do that, you can learn how to get your preparedness spidey sense. You’ll see around corners before something happens. That is a true benefit to you, to your family, to your overall preparedness and your safety, and to your comfort in any kind of emergency. Being able to think, to problem solve, to go through these levels—it really helps you to live more proactively than reactively.
And isn’t that what this is all about? Not living in fear, but living with foresight. Not scrambling when the first domino falls, but having already thought through what happens when the second and third ones go down. That’s what being a strategic prepper means. That’s what 2nd level prepping looks like in practice.
So pick a scenario this week. Grab a piece of paper. Start asking “what happens next?” and trace it three levels deep. Be specific about your situation, your family, your responsibilities. Consider the timeframes. Audit your preps against what you discover. Find that one gap you can start addressing.
Because when those dominoes start falling—and at some point they will—you’ll be glad you took the time to think it through.
Peace,
Todd