Scenarios — quick playbooks
When an incident starts and you need to act in 15 seconds, a 30,000-word deep-dive guide is the wrong tool. A scenario quick-playbook gives you a time-stamped decision tree for one specific incident and routes you into Foundation depth when you need it.
A scenario playbook is short on purpose (3,000–6,000 words, depending on criticality), specific on purpose (one named precipitating event, not "what if everything goes wrong"), and time-bounded on purpose (the response arc fits inside 72 hours). It is not a substitute for Foundation pages or deep-dive Guides — it's an entry surface for in-incident decision-making that routes outward.
If you're not currently in an incident, you may still find the playbooks useful: the printable summary in each one is designed to print to a single 8.5"×11" sheet for a kitchen drawer, a vehicle glovebox, or a workshop wall.
How to use a playbook
A playbook is organized into five time-stamps:
- T+0 to T+15 minutes — Stabilize: What to do right now. Stop the active hazard.
- T+15 minutes to T+1 hour — Triage and contain: Inventory what you have. Decide who needs what.
- T+1 to T+6 hours — Sustain: Establish a routine that runs without thinking.
- T+6 to T+24 hours — Plan for the night: Pre-position for the first night. Sleep matters.
- T+24 to T+72 hours — Maintain or escalate: Sustain the rhythm. Make the relocate-or-stay call deliberately.
Each time-stamp section has a goal, decision criteria for when to branch, an action list, and named failure modes. Cross-Foundation routing tables at the end of each playbook link to deeper references on every action.
Available playbooks
Utility outage scenarios
- Water main break — Your street's water main just broke and pressure has dropped to zero. The 72-hour plan for drinking, hygiene, cooking, and protecting plumbing. ~4,800 words.
- 72-hour winter outage — Grid power is out in subfreezing weather with a 1–3 day restoration estimate. Warm room setup, pipe protection, food preservation, and the carbon-monoxide rules that keep people alive. ~6,000 words. Life-safety.
Medical event scenarios
- No power + medical-device household — Power is out and someone in the house depends on CPAP, oxygen, dialysis, refrigerated medication, or a powered wheelchair. Backup power triage, cold-chain workflow, and the relocation triggers that protect the patient. ~5,500 words. Life-safety.
Coming next (queued in BACKLOG)
These playbooks are queued behind the pilot validation. Once the 3 pilots above pass their post-launch reader-pass, the library expansion begins:
- Apartment lockdown (3–7 day)
- 2-week supply-chain disruption
- Summer heat dome (no power)
- Wildfire evacuation 6-hour notice
- Hurricane shelter-in-place 96-hr
- Household water contamination boil notice
- Cyber-incident financial outage (banking/payment systems down 72-hr)
- Severe medical event (CPR-to-ER 30-min)
- Child-lost-in-public 0–30 min response
- Neighbor medical emergency
If you have an incident type that should be on this list, the way to surface it is by raising the topic in feedback or community channels — most additions to this library come from real incidents readers have lived through.
How this differs from the rest of Survipedia
| Content type | Length | Audience moment | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation pages | 1,500–4,000 words | Reader is planning, reading reference, learning | water/storage.md, medical/wounds.md, energy/generators.md |
| Guides | 25,000–35,000 words | Reader is planning their household resilience over months | guides/first-30-days.md, guides/grid-down-survival.md, guides/homestead-blueprint.md |
| Scenarios (this section) | 3,000–6,000 words | Reader is in the incident, needs to act now | All pages in this section |
A reader landing on a playbook for the first time mid-incident should not need to click out to understand what to do in the first 60 seconds. A reader landing on the same playbook between incidents (e.g., to print the summary) should find that the cross-Foundation routing fills in the deeper preparation context they need.
The format spec
Authors and contributors: the spec defining what makes a scenario quick-playbook is at SCENARIO-PLAYBOOK-FORMAT.md at the root of the repository. It defines: which topics qualify as scenarios, the mandatory section order, the word-count contract, the front-matter requirements, the production workflow, and the pilot acceptance criteria. The current version is v1.1 (May 2026), status stable — graduated from pilot on 2026-05-20 after the reader pass verified all 3 pilot playbooks at WORKING.
Related references
- Scenario planning methodology — How to think about scenarios before any specific incident hits. Complements but does not replace the operational playbooks here.
- Threats Overview — Threat-specific deep references (each threat page covers a specific hazard at depth).
- Guides Overview — Cross-Foundation deep-dive playbooks for longer arcs.
- Preparedness self-assessment — 10-minute scorecard that identifies your weakest 3 Foundations and routes you to the right starting page.
Last reviewed: 2026-05-20 · Hub-page format. Each playbook follows the SCENARIO-PLAYBOOK-FORMAT.md v1.1 spec.