Evacuation

I was about to do food storage, and then I realized that I had missed this.

It seems like emergency evacuations would be covered in between 72 hour kits and emergency plans, and that is partially true. There can be important variations that will affect what you can do and what you should do. Mainly these will be matters of time.

So, in case of fire, we all know that we are supposed to get out of the house as quickly as possible, not taking anything. In case of an earthquake in a tsunami zone it is probably reasonable to grab the kits on your way to higher ground, but you don't want to dilly dally too much.

However, what if there is a superstorm building up off shore that may hit in the next few days? What if there is an unusually large snow pack, and there are concerns that a sudden spring thaw will lead to flooding? What if there are wildfires that may or may not veer in your direction?

All of those are things that have really happened. In the case of the large snow pack, what a lot of people did was move their food storage to higher ground. It is the sort of thing that is valuable to have, especially in a situation where there is the potential for a large disaster, but that can probably not be moved quickly. Moving it early gave one less thing to worry about.

When the situation happens, the issues to think about will be your destination and the amount of time you have. There may be other preparations that are possible, like hosing down the outside of a house in the hopes that it will be less flammable, but also packing up more possessions to take away, so that even if the house is burned down, there are at least some things that do not need to be replaced.

I am in no way trying to emphasize the importance of material things. People are the priority. Safety is the priority, but if you do have time and means, it's worth thinking about. You will need food. You will need clothing. There are also things that you do not need but you care about, and that's fine. So, a good preparation for a time when you may need to flee is to take a look around now. What do you care about? What have you forgotten that you even had?

I have magazines and craft projects that I have not done yet. I do still want to get to them, but I would not replace them if they were lost. Is that a reason to get rid of them now? I don't think so at this time, but if I were to move, maybe I would decide that. It's okay.

I have old notebooks and sketches from when I was younger. I like going through them sometimes, and remembering, but I probably still would not flee with them. I could live without them. At the same time, if the threat was flooding, and I could move them to a higher part of the house, or seal them up, I might. If planning an evacuation ends up being kind of a housecleaning moment, that can be fine, but it doesn't have to be. At this point, we are just thinking.

There are two areas that it would be especially valuable to think about. One is important documents. It is possible to replace birth certificates, marriage certificates, tax records, insurance information, and mortgage agreements, but it tends to be a hassle, and may take longer than is convenient. You may want to have these gathered together and easily located, where you could grab them and take them along just as easily as a 72 hour kit. It may also be worth including contact information for credit cards and bank accounts and even the numbers, though be careful about how you store those and how accessible they are.

The other thing that I strongly recommend is having some easily found and brought along photos. Maybe it can be just one album. It's so easy to store photos digitally, and we do that, but imagine losing power, or losing the computer, or the phone, and not being able to pull that image back up.

(Full disclosure: My last completed writing project is this post-apocalyptic thing and there's a scene where the heroine starts to melt down as she realizes that the only pictures she has of her fiancee are on her phone, and the battery is going out. She doesn't know that she is not going to see him again for six year, but I do. And no, I never watched "Revolution" or "Walking Dead". Anyway, print a few pictures.)