How to Prepare for an Evacuation - By: Richard A Stooker

People in the United States have to evacuate their homes hundreds of times a year, thanks to hurricanes, floods, forest fires, tornados and other emergencies.

It's best to be prepared.

The first step is to decide where you're going, and everybody in your family should understand the possibilities. You can pick three destinations depending on the type of evacuation.

If it's a house fire or a problem just with your home, meet at one particular neighbor's house. That's a lot better than looking for kids in the dark while firemen are struggling to put out the fire.

If your neighborhood is at risk, pick a prominent civic location, such as a large store or the mall.

If your entire city is at risk due to floods or hurricanes, aim for a location one to two hundred miles away. If you have family or friends you can visit, that's the obvious choice. If not, you'll need to be far enough away from the emergency to find a motel room.

Thanks to cell phones, you can probably communicate with your kids. However, you should still have contingency plans about where to pick them up at school, or where to pick up adults at work.

Keep your car in good working condition, with at least half a tank of gas. Don't delay changing the tire. Don't dare the E on the fuel gauge.
Also keep it well supplied with a spare tire (not just one of those "doughnuts), jack and tire rod, road flares, shovel, brush and ice scraper, engine coolant, and jumper cables.

You should also notify out of town family members where you would go in the event of emergency. Then may be able to help you coordinate communications with separated family members, in case of local cell phone network overload. Or could email your plans to kids at school or adults at work.

Your automobile should also hold a 72 hour emergency preparedness kit for every member of your family, plus extra energy bars, as well as much extra water as possible.

Also keep some spare cash (several hundred dollars or more if you can afford it) hidden in a secret stash in your car. You may need to leave without time to spare.

That doesn't mean neglect your ATM debit card. Just after Katrina, I met a woman who'd successfully fled New Orleans with her boyfriend in his car. But she depended on her son's disability check -- which went direct deposit into a tiny credit union that was undoubtedly underwater at that point. It didn't give its customers debit cards.

If she'd banked with a large bank with ATM service, she could have simply gone to the nearest ATM machine to get cash. It may have cost her a service fee, of course, but that's a small problem compared to surviving a Force Five hurricane.

it's also a good idea for everybody to have evacuation packs containing a few days of clothing and other items needed by that person. When it's time to evacuate, everybody needs to know how to grab their pack, get out the door and into the car.

One thing that's smart to do just in case you lose your computer or it dies -- keep all your important files on backup servers. You can email the files as attachments to yourself -- Gmail has room for plenty of attachments. You can also use a service such as Amazon's S3 that will store your files on their servers.

About the Author

Richard Stooker has a long-time interest in health, diet and fitness subjects, including Pilates Rebounder, and Pilates workout.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Richard-A-Stooker/77357

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