(This article was republished on Business Insider on August 9, 2018.)

Friday, July 6th, 2018 started like any other day.

I woke up early, worked out, woke up the kids, made breakfast, and went to work. After work I came home, had dinner with the family, helped my wife give the kids a bath, read stories, and tucked the kids into bed.

As my wife and I were doing the dinner dishes we noticed that the wind was really picking up. Santa Barbara was in a brutal heat wave. The high temperature during the day had been in the mid-90’s and now the sundowner winds were picking up. Sundowners are winds that pick up in the evening and blow hot air across the mountains and down into Santa Barbara. As a result of the 40 mph sundowners, it was actually getting hotter as the evening went on.

After the dishes were done my wife and I watched an episode of “House of Cards”. It had really been just like any other day.

It was 8:40 PM

As we were cleaning up around the house and getting ready to go to bed my wife started getting a few text messages. One of her friends notified us that a fire had been reported in our neighborhood. We stepped out our backdoor and I noticed two things. First, it was really, really hot outside (I later learned that the temperature had peaked at 102 degrees at 8:30 pm). Second, we saw an orange glow on the horizon.

“That looks pretty far away” I said. There was clearly no need for us to worry.

I headed upstairs to take a shower.

It was 8:50 PM

5 minutes later my wife walked into the bathroom. She’d been frantically checking the local news websites and some information about the fire had just started to become available.

She was on the verge of tears.

“They’ve issued a mandatory evacuation for our area. The fire is spreading rapidly. We need to go.”

“Ok. Let me finish my shower and get dressed and we’ll figure it out.” I said. “I’m sure it’s just a precaution.” I was trying to stay calm, but I was getting a little concerned.

I got out of the shower, threw on some clothes, and grabbed our luggage. My wife had already texted her mom and we had invite to stay with her (she lives about 8 miles away near downtown Santa Barbara).

We agreed we’d pack up the car first, then wake the kids just before we left. We knew it would be easier to pack without the kids asking questions, and we didn’t want to worry them any more then necessary.

It was 9:10 PM

We started quickly throwing clothing in our suitcases.  The weather report predicted a few more days of 90+ degree weather. Should we be packing for a day or two away from the house, or if we should be packing in preparation for our house burning down? If our house was going to burn down shouldn’t I pack my most expensive stuff? Then again, it seemed stupid to pack 3 suits and some dress shoes when all I’d need for the weekend were shorts and flip-flops.

We turned on the TV and started to get some live coverage of the fire. It was already being called the Holiday Fire, as it had started in an area called Holiday Hill. Footage from a news helicopter showed multiple buildings and trees on fire, but it wasn’t clear exactly where the fire was (or how close it was).

Suddenly, the power went out.

It was 9:30 PM

This is when I started to get really concerned.

We used the lights on our phone to rummage around for some flashlights, then switched to the flashlights to save the battery on our phones.

My wife checked the news online and read that the firefighters had asked for the power to be cut to the neighborhood for two reasons. First, it was believed that the fire was caused by a downed power line and the firefighters didn’t want any more fires starting. Second, with no power there would be no lights, and with no lights the firefighters could better see where the fire was and where it was spreading.

We sped up our packing. Once our luggage was full I took them downstairs while my wife grabbed our cat carrier and coaxed our cat in.

We heard a knock on our door. It was one of our neighbors, checking to make sure were up and knew about the evacuation. We walked out to the street in our cul-du-sac and the entire horizon was glowing orange. I was so shaken that I didn’t think to take a picture. This is NOT the view from our house, but it’s the best picture I could find that approximates what we saw:

We couldn’t quite see flames because of the smoke, but the fire was very clear and very close. Information was trickling in on the location of the fire and we learned it was only about 1 mile away. More importantly, the fire chief was saying that the fire was 0% contained and burning completely uncontrolled. Multiple houses had already caught fire and the 40 mph winds were causing the fire to rapidly expand.

We had just been through the Thomas Fire 7 months ago, and I knew how fast fire could spread when it was fanned by hot winds. Our neighborhood was close enough to the fire to be in real danger.

We went to start loading my wife’s car and discovered the back of her car was still full from a trip to the park earlier that day. We had to unload her car before we could load our bags.

I ran around gathering our important documents. We have a fireproof safe to hold our valuables, so I opened it and dumped everything into a bag. I then realized there were additional documents we might need that weren’t in the safe – for example, our home insurance documents were in the filing cabinet in my office. I ran in there to get those documents and realized there were a few other documents I needed as well. My wife mentioned that copies of the kids’ birth certificates were in a separate location as well. We spent at least 10-15 minutes gathering the documents and trying to think of anything else important we might be missing.

We discussed what else couldn’t be replaced. My wife felt we should grab the artwork we’d bought on our vacations together. These were paintings we’d purchased from local artists in places like Cambodia, Thailand, Peru, Botswana, and Mexico. We pulled our favorites off the wall, wrapped them in towels and blankets, and went to load them in my car. Unfortunately, my car was filled with my golf gear, so that stuff had to be unloaded before we could load the artwork.

As we looked down our street it was clear that most of our neighbors had already evacuated.

It was 10 pm

The horizon was even brighter. The information web found online said the fire was rapidly spreading. It had already burned 20+ acres and was moving towards us.

It was time to wake the kids. We didn’t want to freak them out, so we decided to tell them that the power went out in our neighborhood so we were going to go to grandma’s house. The plan is that we’d wake each kid, then I’d carry the kid to the car while my wife packed a bag of their clothes.

We started with our daughter and she was a real trooper. She was very confused when we shook her awake and she saw us standing in her room holding flashlights. We told her the power was out and we were heading to Grandma’s. She mumbled an “ok” and her head lolled around as I carried her out to the car and buckled her into her car seat.

Our son was similarly agreeable. We gave him the same line and I carried him out the car. We had hoped the kids would just go back to sleep, but by the time my son was buckled up they were both wide awake. One of our neighbors walked over and asked if we needed any help. I thanked her and said we were fine – we were just going to grab a few more things from the house while the kids waited in the car. She offered to keep the kids company and I happily accepted her offer. This was a big help – we didn’t have to worry about the kids freaking out when we were in the house.

A few minutes later we put the last few things into the cars, loaded the cat into the front seat of my wife’s car, and pulled away from the house.

It was pretty surreal to look in my rear view window, knowing there was a real chance that could be the last time I saw my house.

It was 10:30 pm

We drove to my mother-in-law’s house, got the kids set up in the extra bedroom, tucked them back into bed, and immediately turned on live coverage of the fire. Those next few hours were pretty scary. The fire was jumping through the neighborhood, spread by embers carried by the wind. A few minutes after midnight the fire chief gave another update – the fire was still 0% contained and still burning completely out of control.

We knew there was nothing we could do, so we headed to bed around 12:30 am. I had a hard time sleeping that night. Not only was it hot, but my mother-in-law doesn’t have air conditioning. Normally that’s not a problem, but when it’s ~95 degrees inside the house and there’s no fan…well, it’s tough to sleep. I woke up every few hours to check the news, but there was nothing helpful being reported.

By the time we woke up on Saturday morning the danger had mostly passed.  Although the fire was only 5% contained, it wasn’t spreading any further and a huge number of firefighters had arrived from other cities to assist with the fire.

The power to our house was restored at 4 pm on Saturday and the mandatory evacuation was lifted at 5 pm. Our neighborhood was still under a voluntary evacuation warning, so when we got home at 7 pm we left all of our stuff in the car (just in case we needed to leave in a hurry).

By Sunday morning everything was back to normal. It was almost as if it never happened.

But of course it did happen, and in a way, I’m glad it did. Why? Because having a near-miss on a catastrophic event taught us a number of important lessons that will make us more prepared for the next potential disaster.

 

Lessons Learned

1. Put all of your important documents in a single place, preferably a fireproof safe. One of the most harrowing things about the entire experience was trying to decide what paperwork and documentation we should grab. We’d been keeping our passports in our safe, but as we rummaged through our file cabinet we found a number of additional documents that we realized we needed to bring with us. I’ve since created a list of important documents and put them all in the safe. If we need to leave in a hurry we can just open the safe, dump everything into a bag, and go. Here’s what we have:
   • Passports
   • Original birth certificates plus certified copies
   • Information about my company stock options
   • Home insurance policy
2. Have your pictures and important documents backed up using a cloud based system. Given how easy these systems are to use, there’s just no reason to not use a cloud based solution. A cloud based solution is infinitely superior to just having an external hard drive with a backup. First, a cloud based solution is can be set to continually back up your data. Second, a cloud based solution can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Third, the hard drive backup has a large degree of geographic risk. That is, it’s probably stored close to your computer. Having a backup on a hard drive that sits next to your computer is of no use if your house burns down. For us, losing all of the pictures of our kids would be the single largest loss I can imagine. We have something close to 10,000 pictures of our kids from birth to today. Those pictures can’t be replaced.
3. Create a prioritized list of what you’d grab in an emergency, including a packing list of clothing. I’m a huge fan of lists. Lists provide comfort. Spend a little time putting together a list and then you don’t need to worry about forgetting something in an emergency. It helps to have the list prioritized. That way you can start at the top and then work your way down the list until you run out of time or space. Here’s what our list looks like (our list has specifics for each category, but here are the general categories):
   • Family
   • Pets
   • Documents from safe
   • Clothing (including diapers for kids). We have another separate list of the clothing items for each of us and the kids. This ensures you don’t grab 12 pairs of socks, 2 shirts, and no underwear.
   • Books, water bottles, toys, and stuffed animals for kids (to provide them with comfort and stability)
   • Pack-n-play and cot for kids to sleep on (including sheets)
   • Artwork from our trips
   • Additional food & water
   • Etc.
4. Have flashlights, head lamps, and lanterns easily available. We had plenty of flashlights scattered around the house, but the batteries in one of them had died, so we had to spend a few minutes finding and putting new batteries in it. Unfortunately, we then learned that flashlights aren’t all that useful when you’re trying to pack. You have to be holding them with one hand, which means you only have 1 hand free to pack, carry luggage, carry kids, etc. We would have been better off with lanterns (which you can just put down somewhere to light up a room) and headlamps (again, leaving your hands free).
5. Keep an external battery charged and available. The fire started near the end of the day when my phone was already close to being dead. As soon as we heard about the fire we were on our phones constantly – checking news feeds, communicating via social media, and texting. Frankly, I couldn’t believe how much texting we did. Between me and my wife we easily received 100+ texts in the first hour from various friends and family. The bottom line is that you will be on your phone a LOT if there’s a disaster, and if the power goes out you’ll blow through the battery on your phone pretty quickly. It would be smart to have an external USB battery charged and readily available.
6. Know your neighbors. One of the real positives of the whole experience was that I realized just how well everybody on our cul-de-sac knows each other and how much everybody was willing to help each other out. If you haven’t met your neighbors, go introduce yourself. If you get home from work at the same time that they do or if you run into them on a weekend spend some time chatting with them. Having a good relationship with them could save your life in an emergency.
7. Have an offline power source. Having an uncontrolled fire burning 1 mile from our house was stressful enough, but having the power go out made things much worse and added a lot more stress. Everything was slower and less efficient when done by flashlight. Not having AC meant the house started heating up quickly (which was especially bad when we were stressed and carrying luggage and children around). By the time we left the house I was dripping sweat. And perhaps the worst thing was that having our power out for so long meant we had to throw away a lot of the stuff in our fridge. As a result, we are seriously considering investing in an off-line power source like the Tesla Powerwall 2. This would be charged with excess power from our solar panels and available in the event that there’s a power outage. Not only would we then be able to charge our phones and have head/AC, but we’d be able to host our neighbors and provide those services to them if needed.
8. Ensure your house is properly insured. I don’t know about you, but I don’t regularly review our homeowner’s insurance policy. We insured our house for the amount recommended by our insurance agent when we bought the house and I haven’t really looked at it since. Unfortunately we’ve done a bunch of work on the house but we haven’t updated our policy limits. We were clearly underinsured. If you haven’t looked at your policy in a while I suggest pulling it out, seeing if the numbers make sense, and then do a sanity check with a third part. For us, I contacted our contractor and asked for his guess on what it would cost to rebuild our house, then adjusted our insurance to the midpoint of his estimate.
9. If possible, keep the trunk of your car empty and the gas tank full. Needing to unload both my car and my wife’s car before we could load up our luggage and artwork cost us at least 10 minutes. In this case that wasn’t an issue, but if the fire had been closer and we’d had less time it would have been a huge problem.

My hope is that not only will we be better prepared as a result of this experience, but you will be as well. If you haven’t done any disaster preparedness, please do yourself a favor and go through each of the items above.

Has anybody else had a brush with disaster? What did you learn?

What else should I add to my list above?