What you should pack in your crisis communicator ‘go bag’?

Silicon Valley has become synonymous with a rather distasteful piece of jargon: “disruption.”

While it’s certainly evocative of the tech industry’s habit of shaking up stable markets and producing perpetually fluid futures, it’s also descriptive of what locals expect from the very ground they walk on. Silicon Valley is earthquake country.

Everyone raised there is trained to immediately move away from windows, dive under desks or brace in doorways when the rolling starts. Californians all go about their business as if they didn’t live on a fault line—but they’re instinctively aware that “the big one” can hit at any moment. Everyone has an ingrained personal action plan (and an emergency kit) in place for when disaster strikes.

PR pros should take a similar approach to crisis communications.

Even if you don’t live along a tectonic plate edge, you know that some manner of disruptive disaster is always possible—and you should prepare accordingly.