What to have ready before you are asked to leave

Three kinds of leaving, and only one of them is a problem

It helps to stop thinking about "evacuation" as a single event. In practice there are three, they feel completely different, and the preparation that covers the hardest one covers the other two for free.

Days of warning. A storm is tracked across an ocean, a river is rising slowly, a planned works order says the gas will be off from Monday. You have time to pack properly, to move the car, to ask a relative whether the spare room is free. Almost nobody needs advice for this case; they need a list, so that at hour forty of the warning they are not still deciding.

An hour or two. This is the common one. An incident nearby, an official message, a neighbour at the door. You can take a bag, the documents, the medication and the cat, and you can walk through the house once. Everything on this page is written for this case.

Now. Smoke in the stairwell, water already across the floor, a smell of gas in the hallway. You take people and you leave. Nothing in the house is worth the extra ninety seconds, and that includes this list. The only preparation that helps here is the preparation that was done in advance: a bag that is already packed, by the door you will actually use.

Fire services and civil protection agencies make broadly the same point in their public material: the decisions people struggle with under pressure are the ones nobody made beforehand. Which door. Which bag. Who collects the child. Where we meet if the phones are useless.

Where the first twenty minutes actually go

Ask someone to imagine leaving in a hurry and they picture packing. Watch what actually happens and packing is a small part of it. The time goes somewhere else:

• Finding things that have no fixed home. The passport, the insurance folder, the charger, the spare keys, the pet carrier that is behind the boxes in the storage room.
• Deciding. Does the laptop come? Do we take both cars? Is this serious enough? Every one of these questions is cheap to answer in advance and expensive to answer while putting shoes on.
• Other people. A phone call to a parent who wants to discuss it. A teenager who is not home. A neighbour who needs help down the stairs and would never ask.
• Going back. Up the stairs again for the thing that was forgotten, then again for the second thing.

So the useful work is not buying equipment. It is removing decisions and removing searches. A bag that is packed and findable removes both at once, which is why it comes first.

What goes in the bag, and what it is for

The purpose of the bag is narrow: it gets a person through roughly three days away from home without needing a shop, a pharmacy or a favour. It is not a wilderness kit. Most of what is in it is boring, and the boring items are the ones that get used.

One bag per person who can carry one, packed so it can be lifted with one hand and carried up a flight of stairs. For an adult, a bag in the region of twenty to thirty litres is enough for three days; if it needs two hands and a rest, it is a suitcase pretending to be a bag.

The part you actually use

• Water for the first day — around two litres a person, then refill. Guidance from civil protection agencies commonly works to a few litres per person per day including cooking and washing; for a bag you carry, the first day is the part worth carrying.
• Food that needs nothing — no cooking, no can opener, no refrigeration. Enough for three days, and the kind of thing the people in your household will actually eat when they are miserable.
• A change of clothes and shoes you can walk in. Weather appropriate, and an extra layer more than seems necessary.
• A torch with its own batteries, and a spare set taped to it. Not candles.
• A power bank, charged, and the cable that fits the phones in your household. Put the cable in the bag, not in the kitchen drawer where it lives.
• Soap, toothbrush, any sanitary items — a shelter or a relative's bathroom may have none of this at two in the morning.
• A small first-aid kit, plus the plasters and painkillers you would normally reach for at home.
• Cash in small notes. Card terminals depend on power and a network, and both can be out in the area you are leaving.
• A paper copy of the important phone numbers, because the phone that holds them is the thing most likely to die.

Then check it twice a year. Batteries flatten, children grow out of the spare clothes, the painkillers expire, and the power bank you packed in spring is at eight per cent by autumn. Two dates in the calendar are enough — the clock changes are a convenient excuse.

The longer article on the bag goes through each item, what it replaces, and the four things that are usually packed and almost never used.

The papers, which cause more trouble than anything else

Nothing on this list is as consistently painful as paperwork. Not because it is hard to find in principle, but because it is spread across a drawer, a shelf, an email account and a folder somebody's partner organised in a way nobody else understands.

The fix is dull and it works: one folder, one place, plus a copy somewhere that is not the house.

• Identity documents for everyone in the household, and the children's too
• The insurance policies — home, contents, health, vehicle — with the policy numbers and the claims telephone number
• Whatever shows where you live: tenancy agreement, deed, a recent utility bill
• Medical essentials: a current list of medication with doses, allergies, the names of treating doctors
• Bank and card details, written where a stranger reading them cannot do anything with them alone
• For animals: vaccination records and a photograph of each animal with a person in the frame

Then one copy off site. A sealed envelope with a relative, a deposit box, or an encrypted archive in an account you can reach from a borrowed phone. The test is simple: standing in a car park with a dead phone and no keys, can you still prove who you are and who insures you? If not, the copy is not far enough away from the problem.

The article on documents covers what insurers and public offices typically ask for after an incident, and the photographs worth taking of your own home before anything happens.

Medication and health, decided with a pharmacist

This is the part of the list that is genuinely individual, and the part where general advice is worth least. A household with a child on a daily inhaler, a diabetic relative, or anyone whose medication needs refrigeration has a planning problem that no article can solve.

What is general is the conversation. Ask a pharmacist or the prescribing doctor, in a calm week, two questions: what should we have at home so that a few days away is not a crisis, and what do we do if we leave without it? They answer this regularly. Rules about holding extra supply differ by country, by medicine and by prescription, which is exactly why the answer has to come from them rather than from here.

Two things do not need professional advice. Write the medication list down on paper and put it with the documents, including doses and the strength on the box. And keep the daily medicines somewhere a person leaving in a hurry will pass — not in the bathroom cabinet at the far end of the flat.

Animals, because they decide where you can go

Animals change the problem, and households with pets regularly discover it at the worst moment: many public shelters cannot take them, and hotels that normally accept a dog are full within the hour when a whole district is moving.

So the work is done beforehand, and it is mostly telephone work:

• A carrier or crate per animal, where you can reach it without moving furniture. A cat that senses something is wrong will not be carried in your arms.
• Two places that will take the animal — a relative outside the immediate area, a boarding kennel, a friend in another neighbourhood. Ask now, not then.
• Food, a bowl, a lead, litter, and vaccination records with the documents, because a kennel will ask.
• A photograph of you with the animal, which is what actually settles ownership when an animal is found by somebody else.
• A note on the microchip number, if there is one.

Animal welfare organisations and veterinary bodies publish advice along these lines, and they all make the same point about the hardest case: an animal left behind because the plan assumed it would be allowed somewhere it was not.

The car, and the half tank that is not superstition

If you have a car, the rule that earns its keep is boring: do not let the tank drop below half. The reason is not the distance you need to drive. It is that a filling station needs electricity to pump fuel and a card network to take payment, and the queue at the one working station in the area is not a queue you want to join with a warning light on.

The same logic applies to an electric car: keep enough charge that you can get clear of the area without depending on a charger inside it.

• Park facing out if the street allows it. Thirty seconds now, thirty seconds saved later.
• Keep a paper map of the region in the glovebox. Navigation apps need a network, and the network in an affected area is the first thing to saturate.
• Know a second route out, on different roads, in a different direction. One blocked road should not end the plan.
• A phone charger that lives in the car permanently, not the one you unplug at home.

Where you are going, decided while nothing is happening

Of everything on this page, this is the cheapest to arrange and the most often skipped. Have two destinations, in two different directions, and have asked the people involved.

Different directions matters: the whole point is that the reason you are leaving may have made one of them unreachable. A relative twenty minutes away is a destination; a relative twenty minutes away on the same road as the problem is not.

Write both addresses on the paper that lives with the documents, with the phone numbers, and tell everyone in the household which one is the default. Then one more thing: agree a single meeting point — a petrol station, a car park, a street corner outside the area — for the case where you leave separately and the phones are not working. Households that have this never need it dramatically; households that do not spend the first hour trying to find each other.

Closing up the house, in the time you have

If you have minutes rather than seconds, a short walk through the house is worth doing — in a fixed order, so it does not become a search.

• Unplug what you can reach easily, and leave the refrigerator running unless you are told otherwise.
• Close internal doors behind you. Fire services recommend this consistently, and it costs nothing on the way out.
• Take the bag, the documents, the medication, the animals, the chargers. In that order, because it is the order of how hard they are to replace.
• Lock up as normal, and take your keys even if you think the building will not be there.

Leaving with other people

A plan built around one capable adult is a plan with one point of failure. Two conversations fix most of it.

The first is with the household: who collects the children, from where, and who is the second person if the first cannot. Schools and nurseries have their own release rules, and this is a question to ask in writing in a quiet week.

The second is with the neighbours, and specifically the ones who would have difficulty leaving — an older person on the third floor, someone recovering from surgery, someone living alone with limited mobility. People in that position very rarely ask for help, and the window in which help is useful is short. Knowing which door to knock on is the whole preparation.

What not to do

Short, and the most useful section on the page.

• Do not go back in. Not for the laptop, not for the album, not for the thing that will only take a second. This is the single most repeated warning in official material about house fires, and it is repeated because people do it.
• Do not wait for a second confirmation. If the instruction was to leave, leaving early costs you an inconvenient night. The other order of events is worse.
• Do not try to take everything. A car loaded to the roof is slow to pack, slow to drive and unpleasant to unload at a relative's door at midnight.
• Do not run a generator, a camping stove, a grill or any other burning appliance indoors, in a garage, or near a window or door. Appliances that burn fuel produce carbon monoxide, which cannot be seen or smelled, and health authorities consistently warn that it causes deaths. This applies wherever you end up, not only at home.
• Do not use candles for light. A torch costs less than the smallest fire.
• Do not rely on one phone. One phone, one charger, one network — write the numbers on paper.

The checklist

If you read nothing else, this is the page. Nine lines, most of which are decisions rather than purchases.

Questions

Longer on two of these

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