What do you grab when you have 3 minutes?

We have had many great “bug-out” threads here on H4O. Seven days ago, a “bug-out” was, at least in my mind, an event primarily reacting to a foreign terrorist event with a dirty bomb or some sort of event of criminal intent impacting a large segment of society.

Quick: you have 5 minutes – get stuff for a week and assume you are never coming back to your house.

Last Saturday, a fire started in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. The wind here is variable and the fire was pushed toward the city. City FD, PD, County Sheriff, National Forest immediately started to attack the situation. The fire grew quickly. Our ambient temps were in the high 90's and our relative humidity was very, very low (6-10%). Our mountains are extremely dry.

After six hours, the officials (city/county/forest service) decided that this fire was growing out of control and asked for assistance. The Governor signed the request for federal assistance. Evacuations were being planned; neighborhoods were put on standby for evacuation.

This is where the plan was flawed. Evacuees were told to take 72 hours of medicine and personal items. No one really expected to be away from home for more than a couple days. One TV interview the people spoke about going away for a couple of days and coming back home to everything as they left it. Some did just that; 346 families did not. One family died in their home.

When faced with only 1 to 30 minutes to collect your most valuable and irreplaceable items from your home, what do you gather? One person I know had only enough time to get three shirts and three pants. The fire was that close. Their home is now gone. Nothing but ash.

My point is this; have a checklist of what to grab. The provided shelters filled quickly and the community stepped up to provide food and water. Basic toiletries were also provided. Medicine refills were also provided. Time is critical, and in a stressed situation you won’t be at your best.

The evacuees were allowed to return home starting Thursday evening. The evacuees from the areas with the most homes were burned still have not been given access.

The insurance company wants receipts or photos of your property loss. One asks, “how am I supposed to have receipts when they were burned up?”

Recommendation: scan major purchase receipts (new stove, refrigerator, TV etc…) and scan your important documents.

Also photograph (jpeg files) your home – inside and out. This proves your ownership and helps you to remember what you had.

Store those photos on a removable hard drive. If you use something like Carbonite for backup you are covered. If not, get a second hard drive and put it in a safe deposit box or a family member’s house or at your work. Something away from your home, and not your next-door neighbor’s house.

The challenge is being able to remember everything in your house after being told it is all gone. Do this in your insurance companies office.

Now go scan your files and take photos of your house.

Don’t act like it can never happen to you.

Be prepared. Have a plan.

Really valuable stuff is in a safety deposit box. Valuable stuff is in very heavy fire safe. I would grab my bug out bags, bugout cash, photo albums and some clothes.

I lived in Santa Barbara in June 1990 near the El Sueno Rd 101 exit. The Painted Cave Fire came roaring down the mountain like a blowtorch and they gave us 20 minutes to evacuate. One thing I remembered was that I grabbed my laundry bag of dirty clothes. I had full sets of clothes for a couple of days in my laundry bag; dirty, but enough to get by with for a couple of days. My Chevy k1500 ext cab pickup was new then and I filled up the back seat with as much as it would hold and then I got out of there....

We got evacuated 4-5 years ago. We were new to California and never had to worry about a wildfire in NY. We grabbed the valuables from the safe and my mom had us lug down a bunch of boxes with old pictures. It was scary looking at our house as were leaving knowing theres a possibility we may never see it again.

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My Hummer of course!! and my camera equipment. I better add the wife to that in case she reads this.............
DJinCo once again we have the same thoughts. Good stuff to point out.
All that is my agenda.
I can get more clothes.

Two back up drives here, one wired to the recently completed safe room, so it's in there all the time and one removable and one in the bank of all of my personal property items and my extensive photography files. I have most of my old photo negs and slides scanned but still have some to go.

(on a side note I had a NAS drive and the circuitry died which renders it impossible to access. I have destroyed the case and removed the sata drive and will attempt to gain access to just the drive. I have found that it is stored in Linux format? I found a program that will read that but I'm still not sure if the password protected data will be recoverable) I have still have to connect it to my internal sata port.
I will only use drives in external enclosures and no backup software involved from now on.
Fortunately my lack of trusting all things digital I had most all of that backed up two more times.

I "burned" a disc with receipts and images of valuables and furniture and filed it with my insurance company.
One thing to check on is if you have replacement value or agreed depreciation value on your items.
It's usually right there in your policy, in the fine print!!

In my profession, i am on call for emeregencies at all times. I have a tough box in the bed of the T full of enough gear and supplies to last a week. This includes MRE's and tac gear!! All i have to grab is my colt commando shorty + side arm and im ready to play!!!

Excellent suggestion, DJinCO!

We've scanned our major receipts, documents, certificates, licenses, pictures and such for online backups. I also keep photos of everything on multiple computers.


Documents to think about would include:

Degrees /Diplomas / Transcripts
Medical Records
Large Purchase Receipts and Photos
Insurance Policies
Deeds
Passports
Licenses and Training Certificates
Records of Accounts (utilities, banking, etc.) to include account numbers, website logins and phone numbers
Tax records
Vehicle Titles
Loan / Lein Paperwork
Marriage / Birth Certificates
Phone contact and address information for family and friends
Military Discharge / VA Paperwork

Other things that may be easily portable:
Jewelry
Precious Metals
Laptop computers / tablets and chargers
Photo albums
Keys
Cell phones with chargers
Guns and ammo

I'm sure there are many others. A word of caution on bank lock boxes and postal boxes. In large emergencies they will be closed and you will have no access.

Finally, have some cash on hand. ATMs and card services may go down. We have at least $2,000 available, just in case.

I should add in all those hurricane caused emergencies the cell phones went down. There was a parking lot full of portable towers and equipment I never saw very many deployed. At one point when I got a signal and attempted a call I got a message saying the service was reserved for emergency personnel only. So don't depend on that for communication with family. Better try some type of radios or smoke signals.
Oh and beer will run out early!

Some times, when cell calls don't work, texting will work. It takes a lot less signal to get a text through than a call.

It is wise to have a plan in place before a disaster to meet with your family in an alternate location in case your home is not accessable and people are scattered when the emergency happens. Of course, everyone in your family needs to know about it and many routes to get there.

DJinCO said:

We have had many great “bug-out” threads here on H4O. Seven days ago, a “bug-out” was, at least in my mind, an event primarily reacting to a foreign terrorist event with a dirty bomb or some sort of event of criminal intent impacting a large segment of society.

Be prepared. Have a plan.

Click to expand...

What I most liked about this post was its original primer of a terrorist or crime but the actual application was a natural event - FIRE.

Although I am perfectly capable of visualizing the Mad Max/Book of Eli/NBC etc scenario, the reality is preparation for natural events (tornado, flood, earthquake, icestorm, fire, etc) will also prepare one for the "other" apocalyptic possibles.

The camera photo suggestion is spot on. A pretty simple way to document the amount of "stuff" a family has and help trigger the remembering process when trying to recall what exactly was lost.

Really depends on why I'm bugging out. In the case of a fire that may or may not burn down my house:

Work and personal cell phones, knife, lighter, flashlight, multi-tool, wallet - items always on me.
Passport. Don't want to lose that.
Work laptop and my personal laptop, the two external USB drives from my server, and my two digital cameras. This will get all personal and work related electronic documents, pictures, contact info, etc. I would need.
Grab a garbage bag or two fill with the contents of my file cabinets. Should be all the hard copy only documents I need.
Box of photos, assorted jewelry (both my wife's and what was handed down to me), watches - things that can't (easily) be replaced.
My dogs.
If time permits, clothes, toiletries, etc.
Everything else can be replaced.

All our family is out of state, so we'd either be headed for a hotel (short term evac) or to stay with one of our families (long term evac). Camping gear, food, guns, and all the other "survival" type stuff would be left behind.

Clearly I'm not prepared for such an event. Photos of valuables, scans of important documents, all on a thumb drive would be a smart move. You can get a key chain friendly 64G flash drive for under $50. That's plenty for keeping important documents, scanned and digital photos, etc. with you, and if your house burns down when you are away.... Of course you'd want it encrypted with a password in case you lost it. Another area where I'm ill prepared - I do not have much cash on hand, something that could be very important in a local or regional disaster.

One last thing to think about (probably mentioned elsewhere), never let your vehicles get below 1/4 tank of gas.

Bug out bag, radio, laptop, and the main harddrive out of my desktop covers everything the insurance company couldn't replace (ignoring sentimental value) and gives me my comm network; all of which could be out of the house in 60 to 90 seconds. I'd probably grab one of my guns on the way out the door because those tend to be useful, especially during times of near-riot. If I've got more time, camping gear is in 3 tubs (+ 60 seconds). A week of food is easily tubbed (+120 seconds). Tools are easily portable and boxed (+60 seconds). If I had closer to 20 minutes, I would probably load my motorcycle as it's my primary transportation, and some of my sentimental stuff (flags, letters, pictures, etc).

if i only had three minutes to bug out it would be the guns and gold first then some food and warm clothing all thrown in the back of the one, then head for the hills ...

X2 on the recommendation for using an Internet based backup service if possible. If you do, and lose your computer, you still have your data. I like the Internet backup services that are always on when you are online and automatically back up your stuff in the background while you use your computer. This way, you are more likely to have a current backup.

Also X2 on texting. Texting is much more likely to get through because it doesn't need to get there in real time or near-real time as opposed to voice calls. Most likely, it doesn't matter if your message takes 2 seconds or 2 minutes to be transferred to the recipient. I once heard that the DoD regards text messages as 80% reliable so if you REALLY want to make sure it gets through, send it twice.

I actually lived in a hi-rise in Houston for two years and had to evacuate the building due to fire several times. A few times in the early morning hours - waking up to the building fire alarm from a deep sleep. My computer is custom built in a server case with tool-less quick removable drives; even if you don't have one like this, I would suggest not leaving your computer case screwed closed with your hard disks torqued down if you have more data than is reasonable to store in the cloud - practice cracking open your case and popping out your storage quickly and keep your life scanned and organized in electronic form. I'd pop them out, toss them in a bag with some clothes and basic items to get by with, toss my pet in his pet crate and start running down the 19 flights of stairs. This was shortly after 9-11 so with those events fresh on the mind - I never messed around with 'Am I forgetting anything' or 'should I take fill in the blank?'. I got the hell out. Fortunately I had my apartment to go back to each time, but if I didn't, I honestly would have been fine with everything I left behind being incinerated. I had this process down to about 30 seconds. I didn't have the luxury of loading up a vehicle given the multiple floors of stairs between my apartment and my vehicle.