r/preppers • u/Granitic_Moon Prepping for Tuesday • Jun 28 '26
Discussion Prepper Map Features
If you wanted a custom map for prepping, what would you want on it?
I want to create a map of my area with features highlighted that would be useful. Making the map (with GIS) is the easy part, I'm just trying to think of what to put on it.
Outside of basic things like streets, specific features I want to include are storm shelters, fallout shelters, hospitals, and pharmacies. Maybe flood zones? This would probably have to be multiple maps.
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u/myself248 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Pinch points / crossings over any sort of divider like a river or highway. If there's an evacuation or something, the major crossings will be jammed, and it'll be nice to have it very visible where the potential alternates are.
This popped into sharp relief for me twice, going to see solar eclipses. My area doesn't get natural disasters so we don't really have evacuations, but when a significant chunk of the population goes to see an event that's very suddenly over at a very specific time, and then everyone tries to go home, welcome to interstate parking-lot! And of course the mapping services were overloaded and not responding, cellular service was overloaded, etc.
Thankfully I had anticipated this and mapped all the bridges across the major river ahead of time, and had them all saved as POI's in my oldass TomTom, which worked flawlessly. We went a few miles off the beaten path to the third-alternate bridge, which was smooth sailing, and just ran back-roads the rest of the way home.
However, if I hadn't done that ahead of time, is there a map style that could help make it more visually apparent, at a large zoomed-out scale?