Colleen27
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2007
This is just poor planning. If you live in an area where natural disasters are a danger you know there is the possibility you will have to evacuate with little notice. If you live in an area where hurricanes can hit the laws of probability will tell you they may hit during your life. If you have a pet you know that in the case of an evacuation you will want to take them with you. Knowing these two things it makes sense to be prepared for it. Have any record you may need in the case of an evacuation in a single spot where you can just grab them. If those records include your shot records have them with you. Keep the shots up to date even if you normally wouldn't so you are prepared. In this day and age of electronic documents this can be as simple as a flash drive with all your up to date documents on it.
If you live in an area unlikely to be hit by a natural disaster you can be more lax but with the increased occurrences of wildfires I think there are very few people who truly live somewhere unlikely to be evacuated for some reason.
These are the things I made sure to think of when I lived in a place likely to be hit by a hurricane. I had a small portable fireproof safe with any document I may need and a complete backup of my computer just in case. It just seems like good planning. Does no one take the time to plan out possible emergencies? Do you not have fire and tornado drills with your kids at home? Every year when we run our business continuity DR tests at work I set up one at home.
Knowing those things doesn't help if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck and needed to use the vet money to fix the car, though, or if you planned ahead to have the documents available in the cloud only to lose access to the internet before they're checked. A lot of the chatter when these things happen comes from a very settled, relatively comfortable place where people just can't imagine the difference between $10-a-dose DIY vaccines and $100-a-pet vet vaccines being a budget buster, or that the mental clutter that comes from chronic stress might result in a less-than-perfectly-ordered environment.
I'm guessing from your screen name that you're pretty familiar with plenty of places where evacuation would be virtually unheard of. I'm in semi-rural Michigan, in the bottom part of the Thumb. I suppose in the extreme flooding could be an issue, though I'm not aware of serious/life threatening flooding in my community's history; the high water records in my lifetime have been water-in-the-basement floods, not cars being swept away and people taking refuge in their attics. There's no wildfire risk, no hurricane risk, no earthquakes. So I'll admit to being pretty lax about emergency preparedness. We did some fire drills when we first moved to this house, mostly as it relates to getting to a safe place at a designated neighbor's home and trusting the adults to handle getting the animals to safety, but that's as much as we've ever done.