I was driving down the mountain from Lake Arrowhead toward college when I noticed the forest on both sides of the road was burning.
Not smoke in the distance. Trees and shrubs alight on my left and my right, close enough to feel through the glass. I looked in the mirror and saw the fire had jumped the road behind me, and it was already burning across the road ahead. Fire on all four sides, and nowhere to go.
A firefighter ran to the car, got in, and told me exactly where to drive. He put us in a specific spot and a helicopter dumped water directly onto us. That’s the only reason I’m here to write this.
What I had in that car was nothing. No water, no mask, no radio. I had been hiking and camping for years and I owned a great deal of equipment, all of it at home in a cupboard, because I hadn’t been planning to be in a fire that afternoon.
Why does knowing about preparedness not make you prepared?
Because knowledge lives in your head and emergencies happen to your hands.
I knew what somebody trapped by fire should have. I could have given you a decent list. What I had was a car with a college bag in it, and the list in my head was worth exactly nothing at the moment it mattered.
That gap sits under the whole subject, and most preparedness writing gets it backwards. It teaches you facts, on the assumption that a well-informed person will assemble the right things.
In practice, informed people are among the least prepared, because knowing feels enough like doing that it removes the urgency. I think a lot of preparedness content does real harm that way, because it leaves readers feeling ready when all they’ve done is read.
The only thing that closes the gap is a physical object, packed in advance, in a place you can reach without thinking.
What did the Northridge earthquake teach about preparedness?
Years later, in the early morning, my wife and I were thrown awake by the Northridge earthquake. The furniture moved across the floor on its own. The kitchen emptied itself.
When it stopped and we could think, our son wasn’t where he should have been.
Everything I understood about disaster preparedness became worthless in that moment. We spent the next hours moving through a damaged city with no plan, no supplies and no way to communicate, doing the only thing available to us. That was looking.
I don’t write about that night for the drama. I write about it because of what it taught me about the shape of the failure.
The problem was that we’d never once discussed what we’d do, where we’d meet, or who would check which room. All of that had to be invented at the worst possible time by people who had just been woken by their house moving.
What does a seventy-two-hour emergency kit really cover?
The standard figure is three days of supplies, and it gets repeated so often that people stop asking what it’s for. It’s roughly how long organized help takes to reach most places after a large event. Roads have to be cleared, crews have to be routed, and the first day is usually spent finding out what happened. Seventy-two hours is the gap you’re covering.
Understood that way, the packing decisions get easier. You’re not equipping an expedition. You’re covering three days for people who left in a hurry, which mostly means water, medication, documents, a way to charge a phone, cash in small notes, and enough food that nobody has to make a decision about it. The failure I see most often is over-packing for competence and under-packing for reality. People include a water filter and forget the prescriptions.
Why does one bag for the household not work?
Because it assumes you’ll be together, and Northridge taught me otherwise inside a minute.
A bag somebody can’t find is a bag that doesn’t exist.
One bag means one person carries everything, everybody else is dependent, and if the group separates then most of the household has nothing. It also means the bag is packed for an adult in good health, and that doesn’t describe most families.
Everyone needs their own, sized for them and packed for them. A child’s bag holds a torch they can work, something to eat that they like, and a card with the meeting place and the phone numbers on it. An older relative’s bag holds the medication list, the spare glasses, and copies of the documents that are difficult to replace.
And everybody has to know where their bag is. A bag somebody can’t find is a bag that doesn’t exist.
Why is camping gear the wrong starting point?
This is the mistake I made, and I made it because I had a garage full of good equipment. Camping gear is built on assumptions. You chose the date. You checked the forecast. You packed deliberately, you know where everything is, and you can leave whenever you want. Every one of those assumptions fails in an emergency. Emergency equipment has to work when you didn’t choose the time, the weather is whatever it is, you’re frightened, and you have somewhere between thirty seconds and five minutes. That’s a different design problem, and gear that’s excellent for one is often useless for the other. The practical version: treat your camping kit as a supply cupboard to build from, and keep the bag you grab separate.
| Bag | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Car bag | Water, a torch, a charger, some cash, a copy of your documents |
| Any seventy-two-hour bag | Water, medication, documents, a way to charge a phone, cash in small notes, enough food |
| A child’s bag | A torch they can work, food they like, a card with the meeting place and phone numbers |
| An older relative’s bag | The medication list, spare glasses, copies of hard-to-replace documents |
| Packing priority | Medication first, then documents, then everything else |
| Camping kit | A supply cupboard to build from, kept separate from the grab bag |
My take
Years of camping didn’t help me when the fire jumped the road, because none of it was in the car. Pack a bag for each person in the house, sized for them, and show them where you keep it. Keep it separate from the camping kit. Give the kids a torch they can work and a card with the meeting place on it. Put the medication list and spare glasses in the older relatives’ bags. Do it this week.
What should you do this week to prepare for a wildfire?
Put one bag in the car. Not the perfect one. Water, a torch, a charger, some cash, a copy of your documents. The car bag is the one that would have helped me on that mountain road.
Agree on a meeting place out loud. One nearby, one further away in case the area is closed. Say it to everybody in the house. This costs nothing and it’s the single thing I most wish we’d done before Northridge.
Write the phone numbers on paper. Nobody knows any numbers any more, and a dead phone takes all of them with it.
Pack medication first, then documents, then everything else. Those are the two categories that can’t be bought at a shop later.
Give every person their own bag and show them where it’s kept. Then leave it alone until you check it once a year.
None of that requires believing anything bad will happen. I didn’t believe it either time. The fire didn’t consult me and neither did the earthquake, and both of them found me extremely well informed and entirely unequipped.
The book on this: The Ultimate Bug Out Bag Guide is 196 pages on the bag itself: what goes in it, what gets left out, and how to build one for the people you live with instead of for a catalog.
Seventy-two hours is what a bug out bag has to cover. My bug out bag guide explains what goes in and why, drawn from twenty years of disaster recovery work.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Maps of peak horizontal and vertical accelerations recorded for the Northridge, California, earthquake of January 17, 1994, U.S. Geological Survey
- Basic Disaster Supplies Kit, Ready.gov (FEMA)
