How Do We Know Whether to Stay Home or Evacuate?
Stay or Go? How to Know Whether to Shelter at Home or Evacuate
The short answer: follow official instructions first, always. Beyond that, the pattern is simple. You shelter at home when the danger is outside and your home protects you from it, and you leave when your home itself is becoming the danger.
The reassuring truth: most emergencies are stay-home emergencies
Power outages. Winter storms. Boil-water advisories. Severe weather passing through. The overwhelming majority of emergencies a suburban family will ever face are ones you ride out in your own house where your supplies are, where your kids' beds are, where the dog is calm. This is why a home kit is the foundation of family preparedness: it makes the most likely scenario the most comfortable one.
When you go
You evacuate when home stops being the safe place: a wildfire is approaching, water is rising, you smell gas, the structure is damaged or officials have issued an evacuation order for your area. That last one deserves its own sentence: if authorities say go, go. Evacuation orders are issued with information you don't have from your front porch, and the families who fare worst in wildfires and floods are almost always the ones who waited to see.
A rule of thumb you can teach your kids
If the danger is outside and your house keeps it out and stay. If the danger is your house, or is coming for your house - go. It's not perfect, but it's a frame a nine-year-old can hold onto, and it turns a frightening question into an answerable one. (read more about talking to your kids regarding emergency preparedness here)
Decide the details on an ordinary day
The stay-or-go decision gets dramatically easier when the supporting decisions are already made: two meeting places (one near home, one outside the neighborhood), an out-of-area contact everyone knows to check in with, and kids who know the plan because you've walked through it together calmly, the same way you talk about fire drills at school. Our free Family Communication Plan walks you through every one of those blanks, and it takes about twenty minutes over a weekend breakfast.
Sign up for the alerts that make the call for you
Most counties offer free emergency alerts by text. Search your county name plus 'emergency alerts' and sign up today. Pair that with a NOAA weather radio (the hand-crank kind lives happily in an emergency kit) and you'll hear the official word even if the power and cell networks don't cooperate.
Prepare for both - it's not either/or
A home kit covers the most likely scenario: sheltering in place. A packed go-bag by the door covers the rarer one: leaving in minutes. Families who have both never have to choose between preparedness plans, they just execute whichever one the day calls for.