Decision #1: Evacuate or Stay Put?

The rock band The Clash was one of the earliest voices of the survival/preparation movement with their hit song Should I Stay or Should I Go …

This is still a critical decision that needs to be made in the early stages of any disaster/crisis.

Depending on the emergency, a decision needs to be made whether to stay in the house (which I have termed “bugging in”) or to evacuate (known as “bugging out” or “Getting out of Dodge”).

This decision will be made taking into consideration the nature of the emergency.

First, if the danger is local such as wildfires or a hurricane, or a nearby terrorist attack then it may be the best decision to evacuate.  In this case, take your 72 Hour Emergency Kit(s), get your emergency cash and any valuables that you wish to bring with you, load up the family and pets, get in one or more of your vehicles (that are at least 3/4 full of gas due to prior planning),  and get moving away from the situation. 

If the roads are jammed by other evacuees, being exposed on the road could be more dangerous than staying home so factor this into your decision.

Other conditions might make it the safer option to remain in your home and ride out the emergency. In this case, you have your 72 hour kits as well as all of your other emergency supplies and should be able to ride out a fairly long term event.  It could be important to make yourself as invisible to the outside as possible if the situation involves looting by unprepared criminals.  We will discuss home defense at a later time but if you are in an urban area just realize that most people do not have many supplies and it could get crazy pretty quickly.  You don’t want to be a target and you don’t want to be undefended.

In a major regional emergency, it is likely that the phone system could become overloaded or stop working altogether.  Same for the Internet.  In these cases, text messages might be still functioning so everyone should know how to use text messages or SMS.

It is very important to have an agreed upon “out of state contact” that everyone in your family knows the phone number for.  If you are split up and an emergency happens, everyone can call this person to let them know their status and to learn each others status.

You should also pre-arrange a location within a mile of your house as a Neighborhood Meeting point, and also a location 50-100 miles away as a Regional Meeting point in case your adult family members are separated when disaster strikes and you need to know where to reconnect if there are no working communications.