JoAnne Skelly: Living with fire – evacuation preparedness

What a week! The Davis Fire has been a horrible reminder of what a high fire hazard area we live in.

Today we have power again after three days without, but the winds are so strong that there is a red flag warning with the added weight of “Particularly Dangerous Situation.” At any moment the power could go out again with a “Public Safety Outage Management.”

On Saturday, Sept. 7, when I heard about the fire and saw the flames from our field, I immediately went into evacuation preparedness mode. Although it looked as if the winds would continue to move the fire to the north, rather than south toward us, I wanted to practice our evacuation procedures.

I have a “To Go” box with photos, backup drives and more, but I had to find all the legal papers, computers, IRS, insurance, birth certificates, passports etc. I had moved them out of the To Go box a few months after the last fire in 2016.

I took a quick video of the house contents on my phone because I wasn’t sure where the last one was. I made sure we had our cell phones and chargers. I loaded a painting my mother had done and a beautiful irreplaceable mosaic gazing ball our friend Peg had given me.

We got the cat carriers down and cat food ready to go. We gathered our toiletries and three days’ worth of clothes and packed up medications and extra glasses. I gathered all these things and more, not from my memory, but from my friend and colleague Ed Smith’s invaluable information based on his Living with Fire program.

I keep an evacuation information bandanna he had given out years ago in the To Go box. Not only is the information helpful, but the bandanna can also be used to cover my nose and mouth in escaping a smoky fire environment.

It also lists a number of things to prepare the house for evacuation as well if you have time. This includes closing the interior doors, turning off pilot lights, closing the fireplace damper, moving upholstered furniture to the center of the room and taking down non-fire-resistant curtains.

Outside the advice is to shut off the propane tank or natural gas at the meter, put combustible patio furniture in the garage, turn on the outside lights and connect garden hoses to faucets with nozzles.

For more details on preparing for evacuation go to https://www.livingwithfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Evacuation-Checklist-2020-one-page.pdf. You might want to print this out and put it in your To Go box.

JoAnne Skelly is Associate Professor & Extension Educator Emerita at University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. Email skellyj@unr.edu