Tag Archives: evacuation

Practicing evacuation

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Angela at Food Storage and Survival recently posted a great entry on practicing evacuations with the family:

When it came time for the activity, I told everyone that we were going to pretend that we were sitting around the house together when we got a phone call or someone came to the door and the local dam was breaking and we had 10 minutes to get out of our house.  We may or may not return to it and if we return the things we left could very likely be damaged or destroyed.  In the meantime, we’re evacuating to the next town or possibly farther, but society will still be intact where we’re headed.  What are you going to take?  Ready?  Go.

Read the whole thing. There are some excellent lessons to be learned in it. I think our family may do this soon.

Keeping sufficient gas in your car

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To continue on the theme of the last post a bit, I believe it was the same person who first taught me about disaster kits who told me that you should always keep at least half a tank of gas in your car at all times. The reasoning, he said, was that in an evacuation you don’t want to have to stop to fill up. Even if you are not in any physical danger at the moment, you could encounter long lines at the gas station of those who do need to gas up.

It’s better, he said, to keep at least half a tank in your car. That way you can drive quite a distance before you really do need to fill up, and that should usually be enough to get you out of the area of danger. Gas stations farther away will not be as busy, as well.

I have always tried to heed this advice, at least most of the time. But thinking back on it, is it really necessary? Is it over-thinking things? Like the disaster kit it’s something that doesn’t really make sense until suddenly it does. But then, how many disasters are going to require that you drive 100 or more miles to escape?

What do you think? Is keeping half a tank of gas in your car a sound practice, or just needless fuss?