You need a Go Bag.
Happy December all! We're in the home stretch! The days are counting down to 2020. Wow, I feel old. Maybe over the Thanksgiving weekend family members traveled to visit others. Now they're returning home getting ready for the new work week. That was also the case in my home.
My mother returned home earlier this afternoon from a visit to her sister's new abode. She was relaxing, having sat down to watch TV in a common area. I was in the kitchen area, as I recall talking with her. We live in a three-story apartment building and fire alarms are often set off my light smoke from the kitchen, so false alarms are frequent enough that when you hear a sounding whine you aren't super startled. You wait it out maybe a minute. Today the sound that shook the household was louder and more annoying than usual.
And so my mother took off in the hallway to check it out. To investigate. Nosy, but vigilant. Turns out other people were also standing in the hallway looking around to investigate. And they were right to. Turns out there was an electrical fire in an apartment on the floor above us. The firefighters were in the middle of stomping the fire that had sparked randomly from a ceiling vent in the respective bathroom. So then, maybe neighborly curiosity cemented into heightened vigilance. So the news spreads to other members of the household who also bear the burden of vigilance. But again, nosiness has its place.
Instead of staying far from the locus of danger, my mother tends to hover nearby. This serves two purposes, nosiness but also information.You need to be aware of what's happening in your surroundings to act appropriately. At some point, when my sister and I were back in the apartment standing in the doorway to keep apprised, our mother was off, again around the locus of danger, asking the firefighters and affected family for information. Later on she would (presumably) hover around the third floor for more information until at last she came down informing us that the firefighters wanted people to exit the building.
Let me say that at no point was there a formal evacuation, but apparently one spread informally through word of mouth. Thankfully everyone had been primed by a second, more egregious alarm that sounded throughout the building after most were aware of the firefighting presence. So set out to evacuate with relative distance from the fire source my household set out to leave. Hurriedly but at a snail's pace we packed, we layered clothes, we checked to make sure key items, people, and pets were gone. But we took our time. Thankfully the fire never spread and it never got to the point of fear for our lives, but had it gotten that serious we would have been seriously screwed. And so, it's time to rebuild my Go Bag.
Bug-out bag, emergency preparedness kit, grab bag - the Go Bag (which for the purposes of this post will be treated as a proper noun) has many names. A few years ago, after suddenly writing an evacuation plan (I should make a new one as I've since moved), I gathered the basic tenets of a Go Bag. Different sites have different standards but per the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) an emergency kit includes the following:
My mother returned home earlier this afternoon from a visit to her sister's new abode. She was relaxing, having sat down to watch TV in a common area. I was in the kitchen area, as I recall talking with her. We live in a three-story apartment building and fire alarms are often set off my light smoke from the kitchen, so false alarms are frequent enough that when you hear a sounding whine you aren't super startled. You wait it out maybe a minute. Today the sound that shook the household was louder and more annoying than usual.
And so my mother took off in the hallway to check it out. To investigate. Nosy, but vigilant. Turns out other people were also standing in the hallway looking around to investigate. And they were right to. Turns out there was an electrical fire in an apartment on the floor above us. The firefighters were in the middle of stomping the fire that had sparked randomly from a ceiling vent in the respective bathroom. So then, maybe neighborly curiosity cemented into heightened vigilance. So the news spreads to other members of the household who also bear the burden of vigilance. But again, nosiness has its place.
Instead of staying far from the locus of danger, my mother tends to hover nearby. This serves two purposes, nosiness but also information.You need to be aware of what's happening in your surroundings to act appropriately. At some point, when my sister and I were back in the apartment standing in the doorway to keep apprised, our mother was off, again around the locus of danger, asking the firefighters and affected family for information. Later on she would (presumably) hover around the third floor for more information until at last she came down informing us that the firefighters wanted people to exit the building.
Let me say that at no point was there a formal evacuation, but apparently one spread informally through word of mouth. Thankfully everyone had been primed by a second, more egregious alarm that sounded throughout the building after most were aware of the firefighting presence. So set out to evacuate with relative distance from the fire source my household set out to leave. Hurriedly but at a snail's pace we packed, we layered clothes, we checked to make sure key items, people, and pets were gone. But we took our time. Thankfully the fire never spread and it never got to the point of fear for our lives, but had it gotten that serious we would have been seriously screwed. And so, it's time to rebuild my Go Bag.
Bug-out bag, emergency preparedness kit, grab bag - the Go Bag (which for the purposes of this post will be treated as a proper noun) has many names. A few years ago, after suddenly writing an evacuation plan (I should make a new one as I've since moved), I gathered the basic tenets of a Go Bag. Different sites have different standards but per the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) an emergency kit includes the following:
- Water - one gallon of water per person per day for at least three days, for drinking and sanitation
- Food - at least a three-day supply of non-perishable food
- Battery-powered or hand crank radio and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert
- Flashlight
- First aid kit
- Extra batteries
- Whistle to signal for help
- Dust mask to help filter contaminated air and plastic sheeting and duct tape to shelter-in-place
- Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation
- Wrench or pliers to turn off utilities
- Manual can opener for food
- Local maps
- Cell phone with chargers and a backup battery
Now at one gallon of water per day per person for three days it's very unlikely (though not impossible) that anyone is fitting their emergency kit in a bag, even in a single person household. Then again the definition of bag is variable. But thinking practically hauling a huge duffel bag in an emergency might prove a difficult feat. There's also individual variations to an emergency plan that factor in geographical location, local weather or emergency tendencies, and proximity to urbanity. In other words someone in New York City is going to have a different Go Bag and emergency plan when compared to someone in the middle of Kansas or a resident in the Hurricane Alley.
I used to keep a mostly stocked bag, but my impression is that its contents slowly got used. And that's fine because those contents might expire and should be being periodically checked, but it's a shame that effort fell by the wayside. Medication, another individualization, was shortcutted into my spoken evacuation plan. I keep bottles of pills, bottles with expiration dates I stay on top of, in larger plastic containers that this time around were easily stuffed into my backpack. On a day-to-day basis my important personal and identification cards are localized in a bag, so that was easy to locate. What I hadn't considered was taking lotions and Tylenol, two items I grabbed haphazardly in a last minute effort to feel as secure as possible.
What I'm taking away from this incident is I need to rebuild my Go Bag, create a new evacuation plan and make it as flexible as possible. My Go Bag and evacuation plans from Philadelphia were constructed with a natural disaster in mind. This was a local fire and I wasn't as prepared as I should be. Are you?
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