Wildfire gives you less warning than water
Flooding usually announces itself. Rain falls for hours, the creek comes up, gauges climb, and there’s time, sometimes not much, but time. A wind-driven fire can change direction in minutes and close the road you were planning to use. A wildfire evacuation checklist you built on a calm evening is what makes fifteen minutes workable. Plan for a wildfire evacuation as if you’ll have fifteen minutes, and treat anything more than that as a gift.
That’s the reason to pack the thinking now rather than the bag now. You can’t keep a bag packed year round with your medications and your laptop in it, but you can decide, once, where everything is and who grabs what.
The Six P’s: CAL FIRE’s wildfire evacuation checklist
CAL FIRE’s evacuation checklist has been in use long enough to be worth borrowing whole. Six categories, in priority order:
- People and pets. Everyone accounted for, animals crated or leashed before you need them.
- Papers, phone numbers, and important documents. Insurance policy, deed or lease, IDs, the phone numbers you can’t recall from memory.
- Prescriptions, vitamins, and eyeglasses. Including the reading glasses, which sounds minor until you’re filling out forms at a shelter.
- Pictures and irreplaceable memorabilia. The things that cannot be replaced at any price.
- Personal computer, hard drive, and disks. Or just the external drive, if that’s where the backup lives.
- Plastic and cash. Credit and ATM cards plus cash, because card readers need power and a network.
If you did the work in the earlier post on protecting important documents, the second and fourth P’s are already a single folder and a single drive, and you can be out the door faster. That post now covers photographs and keepsakes as their own job, which is the part people skip.
What a fire bag has that a flood bag doesn’t
Most of an emergency kit is the same regardless of the hazard. A few things are specific to fire:
- N95 or P100 respirators, several per person. Our post on wildfire risk explains why a bandana does nothing.
- Closed-toe boots, long pants, long sleeves, work gloves. CAL FIRE’s evacuation guidance calls for clothes that cover your skin, cotton being best, and tough shoes. Skip synthetic fleece and athletic wear.
- Goggles or safety glasses. Smoke and ash in the eyes is what usually stops people from being able to drive.
- A headlamp or flashlight per person. Smoke can turn midday into dusk.
- Copies of the same documents in a second place. A relative’s house, a safe deposit box, or encrypted cloud storage.
Leave early, and leave the way you already decided
Hot Springs has limited ways out. Use the three routes you wrote down after our post on evacuation routes, and decide now which one you would take if the fire is on the ridge above you.
A few things that cost nothing and save minutes: back the car into the driveway or park it facing out, keep the gas tank at least half full through fire season, keep one set of keys in a spot everyone in the house knows, and if you have livestock, know now where they can go, because trailers and pasture arrangements can’t be organized in fifteen minutes.
Know how you’ll be told, and check the smoke map
Two separate alert systems cover people here, and signing up for one doesn’t sign you up for the other. The Town of Hot Springs sends CodeRED alerts, and you can sign up through townofhotsprings.org. Madison County uses Hyper-Reach for county-wide emergency notifications, with its own signup page. Do both, for every phone in the household.
Here’s a step past the basics. If someone in your home has asthma, COPD, heart disease, or is pregnant or elderly, you may need to leave before an evacuation order rather than when one comes. The AirNow Fire and Smoke Map, run by the EPA and the U.S. Forest Service, shows fine particle levels near you, and it lets you make that call on data instead of on how the air looks. Smoke can be a health emergency in a house that a fire never comes near.
FEMA runs a shelter lookup by text, and Ready NC points residents to it. Text SHELTER and your ZIP code to 43362 to find the nearest open one.
The list above takes about twenty minutes to work through on a calm evening. Do that once, tell everybody in the house where the folder and the drive live, and the fifteen-minute version becomes possible. Winter is next, starting with what an old house needs before the first hard freeze.
Resources mentioned in this post
- Wildfire Action Plan and the Six P’s, CAL FIRE: https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/wildfire-action-plan
- Go! Evacuation Guide, CAL FIRE: https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/go-evacuation-guide/
- Wildfire, Ready NC and North Carolina Emergency Management: https://www.readync.gov/wildfire
- Fire and Smoke Map, AirNow, U.S. EPA and USDA Forest Service: https://fire.airnow.gov/
- Emergency Management, Madison County: https://www.madisoncountync.gov/emergency-management.html
- Hyper-Reach emergency notification signup, Madison County: https://hyper-reach.com/ncmadisonsignup.html
- Sign up for CodeRED alerts, Town of Hot Springs: https://townofhotsprings.org/alerts/