Chapter 4 | Evacuating and Getting Out in Time
How to Think, Pack, and Move When Every Minute Counts
This article is part of The CP Journal’s Individual Readiness Playbook.
Let me ask you a question. If your house caught fire right now, what would you grab on your way out the door?
How would that change if you had ten minutes of warning before you needed to leave?
What if you had one hour?
Those three time windows show that evacuating your home isn’t just about leaving, but a reflection of how ready you are to make decisions when time is of the essence. When there is pressure and emotions are running high, what will you do?
And there are two competing dynamics at play when a person evacuates their home:
There is the possibility that you won’t have a home to return to.
The reality that every minute you delay leaving increases the risk you face.
The more stuff you try to save by packing into your car, the longer you stay, and the longer it takes you to get to a safe location. This creates an increased risk of not getting out of the area in time.
The faster you leave, the less time it takes to get out of harm’s way, but potentially at a cost of not having the things that would make recovery from the incident faster or easier.
While an evacuation plan cannot eliminate the tension between these elements, it can help you decide how you will navigate it if you are ever forced into a situation where evacuation is the best option available.
A Short Primer
Evacuation is simply the movement from an area potentially at risk to an area that is not.
And there are two types of “safe locations” you’re looking for during this movement:
Immediate Safe Location - a spot where you are physically out of danger.
A Sustained Safe Location - a place you can sleep, eat, and operate from until stability returns.
Sometimes immediate safety is just a few steps away and only requires you to leave the building you are in. Other times, as we have seen in large wildfires, hurricanes, or fast moving incidents, it can be tens or hundreds of miles away.
But of the two approaches we discuss in this playbook—evacuating and protecting-in-place—evacuation is rarely the preferred option. Movement introduces variables like traffic, fuel, road closures, food, weather, and panic. Staying in place is often the simpler and safer choice, but when evacuation is necessary, hesitation becomes the hazard. This article is here to prevent that.
A quick word on “Bug-Out Bags.”
You’ll notice this article won’t be talking about “bug out bags.” Evacuation and “bugging out” are often treated as the same thing, but they really aren’t.
The common cultural image of a bug-out bag assumes societal collapse—off-grid living, long-term displacement, and self-sufficiency in a lawless environment. I suppose that scenario is not impossible, but it isn’t the highest probability either.
Most evacuations are for fires, storms, gas leaks, infrastructure failures, or localized violence. In those cases, people go to a hotel, a friend’s house, or a government shelter—not into the wilderness.
If you want to prepare for collapse, by all means, go for it. But don’t let cinematic scenarios distract you from the events that are statistically far more common to force you from your home.