Someone I know had to evacuate her house a few months ago. She lives near a busy road, and there was some kind of accident, nothing too serious except that the truck involved in the accident was carrying some kind of dangerous chemical.
So there she was, with her small children and another child she was babysitting, when a police officer knocked at her door to tell her to get out of the house immediately. She explained that it would take her a few minutes to get everything together and the officer told her she didn’t have a few minutes. She had less than a minute to get the kids out of the house and into the car.
Luckily, she was prepared. Not only did she get the kids into the car, she grabbed her family’s emergency backpack kits. Which meant that, even though she wound up having to spend the rest of the afternoon waiting to go back home, she had everything she needed to take care of the kids and keep them happy.
Whether you want to be ready to head to a hurricane shelter at a moment’s notice or you live in an area where there are mud slides and brush fires, all of us have moments when we need to be able to just pick up and go. Luckily it’s not as hard as you might think to put something together. You just have to get past all the lists out there and think about your family and their needs.
The standard advice for an evacuation kit is to have on hand everything you might need for three days. It should be portable, but still contain everything your family might reasonably need for three days, including food, water, and first aid supplies.
Oh yeah. Sure. I’ll just throw that together off the top of my head. Maybe tomorrow? Or next month? Next month would definitely be better. Get back to me next month. Or next year.
That’s how I used to feel about the whole subject. I found it completely overwhelming. And then one day it hit me. I’ve done this before! Only I didn’t call it emergency preparedness, I called it “packing for a car trip”.
In part 2, I’ll talk you through packing for your own “car trip”.