Preparing for a Fire
1. Decide if you will evacuate or stay in your house if a wildfire occurs in your area. Read the page about, ”Fire Safe and Fire Prone?” (link) Make your house as Defensible as possible. Create as much Defensible Space around your home as you can. Read the fictional story about the Great Cambria Fire (link) and decide what you want your story to be.
2. Identify other routes to or from your house and mark them with a yellow marker on the maps you can download (link). Place copies of the map in your vehicles. Your usual route to or from your hose may be blocked by fire, emergency vehicles, downed power lines, etc. Find alternatives! Your life may depend on them.
3. On the maps you place in your vehicles, write the cell phone and telephone numbers of friends and family. identify a friend or relative out of the area to serve as a message center for you. Give a copy of the list to everyone in your residence to carry in their purse/wallet. Find out how to use a friend's answering machine as a message center.
Review the steps below to follow an organized plan for evacuation.
4. Connect garden hose with nozzles to faucets.
5. Decide on a place to meet members of your household if you are separated at the time of a wildfire. Home or a house of a friend? The Cambria Veterans Hall, Cambria Elementary and Coast Union High School’s are evacuation shelters.
6. Assemble important documents and keepsakes you would want to save into one spot. The speed of an approaching fire may not allow time to hunt for things you want to take. If you could only evacuate one armload of personal items, what would they be?
7. Make a plan for evacuating your pets. Have pet cariers or cages readily available. You wouldn't want a wild, terrified pet in your car.
8. Practice your evacuation. Drive the routes you identified in #2 above. Practice loading pets, etc. in your car.
9. Read the sections in your SBC phone book on preparing for emergencies.