Too Much Stuff to Bug Out With? Try Staging

As the Los Angeles area of California braces for the fourth large storm in the past few days, the threat of flooding and mud slides in residential areas is reaching critical mass. The mayor and emergency services are telling residents to be prepared to evacuate their homes, and that if a law enforcement officer shows up at their door and tells them to leave, they must leave! Residents are also being advised to have enough food, water, and other supplies on hand to survive for 72 hours away from home.

That's sound advice, but historically many residents have been reluctant to leave their homes and leave all the stuff they worked so hard to acquire to the fate of the weather. How do you pack 500 books, 1,000 DVDs and CDs, a coin collection, that Rembrandt painting, the gun collection, the spare ammunition, several decades worth of photographs, the Persian rug ... into the family SUV along with two kids and the dog?

You can't. And even if you could, do you want to leave all that valuable stuff locked up in a vehicle that may get broken into?

But what you can do is to prepare in advance of storm season and stage at least some of these items in a location outside of the danger zone. This could be at a friend or relative's home, it could be in a rent-by-the-month storage locker.

This solution isn't rocket science, but it does require some planning long before the storm clouds start gathering. It requires taking the time to determine a storage location and plan what needs to be transported there. The other part of the plan is knowing what can be left behind because it can be replaced fairly easily. And for those items, it also requires having a homeowners insurance policy that will cover the cost of replacing items damaged or lost.

We are lucky that modern technology can predict bad weather. it gives us the opportunity to plan, and prepare so that if that knock on the door comes, we can grab our personal bugout bag and get out of Dodge without having to worry about those items that are so important to us.