You get a knock on your door in the middle of the night. Maybe your phone blows up with dozens of emergency notifications. The message? You need to evacuate. You have a specific amount of time before you need to leave home: a day, an hour, five minutes. What do you grab in the time that officials give you?
Ideally, that moment will not be the first time you give this issue some thought. You should spend a little bit of time in calmness anticipating such an event so that you can activate with confidence when you need to. During an evacuation order, a surge of adrenaline might impede your ability to think through what you need to gather and shove into your car and what to do next. So take some time now to prepare.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has come up with a simple memory tool, The Five Ps of Evacuation, to help you identify the items to pack into your vehicle. We’ve added several additional Ps (Pets, Plan, and Prepared Pack):
- People
- Pets
- Prescriptions
- Papers
- Priceless Items
- Personal Needs
- Plan
- Prepared Pack
People and Pets
Obviously, the most important items on your list are the living beings covered by the first two bullet points: the people and the pets in your home or the livestock you keep. Have a plan for evacuating these most important creatures.
If you are responsible for caring for an elderly relative you don’t live with, it’s important to have some sort of evacuation plan in place that takes into account the fact that you might not be able to get to that relative during a crisis. Does your relative have neighbors who could take charge of him or her during an emergency? If you set up a plan like this, make sure you and the neighbors also come up with a way to reconnect after the emergency, via phone, so that you can eventually be reunited with your relative. Choosing an out-of-state phone number for both of you to call is wise, since phone connections out of state are often operational before local ones in an emergency.
Develop a plan for the evacuation of all the animals for which you are responsible. For example, I have five chickens, so I bought a used large dog crate that will fit all five in an emergency. If you have a horse, make sure you have a horse trailer. You might also consider investing in a portable corral so that, while you are in evacuation, your horse will have a safe space wherever you take it.
If you have large animals like horses or cattle, connect with other ranchers in your area to form a collaborative evacuation plan. If you are out of town when disaster strikes, you’ll feel reassured that there is a plan in place to help evacuate your animals. InfoHorse.com offers additional considerations for horse evacuations.
Prescriptions
If you need to evacuate, you don’t want to be separated from your essential prescriptions. When you pack your go bag, grab those medications, and make sure you grab them for everyone, including pets.
You should also contact your doctor now, when there’s no emergency happening, to request a backup prescription of each medication to keep on hand for a crisis. That way, when you are far from your pharmacy or when pharmacies are closed during a disaster, you won’t run out of your medications. Then rotate them in before they expire and replace the emergency supply with your latest refill.
Keep this thought in the back of your mind: The Emergency Prescription Assistance Program (EPAP) is a federal program to help people in a disaster region get prescriptions refilled. More than 72,000 pharmacies in the United States participate in the program. However, EPAP is only available to you once it’s been activated, so it’s best used as a backup remedy.
Papers
So that you’re not having to rummage around your file cabinet in an emergency, keep copies of your crucial papers in a safe place (or on a thumb drive). Include copies of the following documents for each person in your family:
- Driver’s license
- Passport
- Birth certificate
- Social security card
- Health insurance card
- Marriage license
- Will and Power of attorney
- Adoption papers
- Vehicle registration
- Mortgage
- Bank account numbers
- Credit/debit card numbers
- IRAs and other retirement information
- Investment documents
- Insurance documents
- Your latest tax returns
Priceless Items
Think about the things you own that you would be devastated to lose. Forget the heirloom furniture unless you have a large vehicle and lots of time to prepare. We’re talking about items like photographs, awards, cremation ashes, unique artwork, expensive jewelry, valuable coin or stamp collections, old first edition books, and other items that have personal meaning that you will be unable to replace.
Don’t go overboard on this category. Remember that whatever you take you will then have to keep secure while you are on the road and away from home.
Personal Needs
After you’ve worked through the other Ps and if you still have time, focus on the items that you will need during evacuation but that you could buy new if you had to. This list includes toiletry items, changes of clothes, and gear for the weather you are likely to encounter. Don’t forget phone chargers, food, water, a first aid kit, and cash, since during emergencies credit and debit cards often will not be accepted.
Plan
What is your plan during an evacuation? Where will you go? How will you get there?
Come up with some potential destinations (your brother who lives out of state, a friend who lives up north, a large campground a few hours away) in advance of an emergency. Discuss your plan with the others you might involve (your brother, your friend). Mark up a map with all of the possible evacuation routes from your home so that you don’t need to rely on a phone app at a time when cell service may be down or overloaded.
Prepared Pack
The prepared pack is a go bag that encompasses elements of the other seven Ps. Which of the previous seven Ps can you store in a bag to grab during an evacuation?
- Papers
- Emergency prescriptions
- Extra phone chargers
- First aid kit
- Cash
- Emergency water filters (like LifeStraws)
- Snacks
- Emergency blankets
- Your plan
- List of emergency phone numbers (people out of state or far enough way you could call on for help)
- Evacuation map
Use this PDF checklist of the 8 Ps of Evacuation to help you prepare: