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(Continued from Part 2.)

OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT: 

1. Radios – both Motorola radios AND handheld ham radios were left behind that would have helped us stay in contact between our 2 cars. Cell phones worked (thankfully), but I noticed bad connections nearly every call.
   1. NOTE: if we had a better means of communication, W. could have taken her car to the other neighborhood exit to see if traffic was flowing better and reported back to me to either follow her or stay where I was (oh well, hindsight and all that).
2. Scanners, or even scanner apps – having access to information from the FD might have given us information a bit sooner.
3. Extra clothes – it sucks to have only 1 pair of pants to wear continuously for several days when they’re full of smoke and you’re sleeping in them (yuck).
4. We needed backup pet items (food bowls, water bowl, litter box, and litter) all in 1 bag and added to the checklist (a pet-BOB, if you will).
5. We have monthly poker nights and our small “bank” doubles as part of our emergency cash “stash”. It got left behind the first night (grabbed later) – needed to be added to checklist.
6. Power cords – we had micro-USB cords for the cell phones, but my laptop power cord was missed.

Tuesday, 12/05/17

~6:00am

The night finally ended but the winds were still howling, and we couldn’t find any good information on where the fire was or where it might be heading. We went to the County Gov’t Center to try to find some answers (W knows some people there).Continue reading“Our Wildfire Evacuation, Part 3, by SoCal9mm”

(Continued from Part 1.)

So we put this plan together on paper, that’s all that we needed to do, right? Um, no. Practicing an evacuation drill is probably at least as important as having an evacuation plan. After I had revised our plan into the checklist format, I knew that we needed to practice it to see if the timeframes were correct (i.e., could we actually do all the stuff that I’d written down on the 1-minute checklist in 1 minute?). Shortly after the Tubbs Fire (in October, 2017) we did a walk-through of the house and pointed out all the items on the checklist and where they were located. We planned to do a dry run on November 5th – but something came up and we had to postpone it… We never did get the chance to do that dry run before we had to “do it live.”

Of course it goes without saying that this is my checklist – it (mostly) works for me and my family, and it’s always undergoing tweaks and revisions as new items get added, as things get moved around for better storage, or if my wife (henceforth, “W.” in this article) has a better idea than one of mine. Should you decide that a checklist could work for you, yours will likely be different (and may be very different) from mine. That’s great – customizing any plan to fit your family’s needs is exactly what is should happen; just like my dissatisfaction with the “generic emergency-fair” list is what prompted me to make one that was a better fit for us.

So that’s the story of how our checklists were supposed to work out. How did we do during the actual evacuation?Continue reading“Our Wildfire Evacuation, Part 2, by SoCal9mm”

Editor’s Introductory Note:  At nearly 10,000 words, this is one of the longest multi-part articles ever to appear in SurvivalBlog. It will be presented in five parts, concluding on Saturday. Despite its length, this is some fascinating and detailed reading. The author’s insights and “lessons learned” are quite valuable, and they go far beyond just the particular concerns of wildfire evacuation.

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On the evening of December 4, 2017, the Thomas Fire started in Ventura County, California. By the time it was over, about 440 square miles had burned across Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, more than 1,000 structures were lost, and at least 23 people had perished (2 directly from the fire, and another 21 [plus 2 missing] from subsequent mudslides caused by denuded hills). This fire resulted from the combination of a long-term drought (very dry brush) and a very strong Santa Ana wind condition (a semi-routine wind pattern that blows from the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona and pushes warm and very dry air into SoCal). Temperatures, even on this December evening, were in the 60s – 70s, humidity was in the single digits, and winds were blowing up to 70 mph. A spark was all that was needed to set off this firestorm, and that was provided by a downed power line.

The Thomas Fire came right on the heels of the devastating Tubbs Fire in and around Santa Rosa, California, which burned so quickly that entire neighborhoods were engulfed before people could escape. One heartbreaking news story told of a trapped couple who had to shelter all night in a swimming pool, just briefly exposing their mouths and noses to get air before going back down to escape the heat / flames. The husband survived, but the wife did not. The only thing to come out of the Tubbs Fire that could be called “good” was that such terrible stories from Santa Rosa were fresh in the minds of many of us in Ventura County – and we knew that we had to get out NOW when the evacuation was called for. I firmly believe that without the “lesson” that the Tubbs Fire taught many Californians, the death toll from the Thomas Fire would have been higher.

On the first night of the Thomas Fire, somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people were forced to evacuate from our homes. Over the course of the next 3-to-4 weeks, as the fire spread across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, the number of people displaced rose to over 100,000. We were out of our home for a little more than four weeks.Continue reading“Our Wildfire Evacuation, Part 1, by SoCal9mm”