I just watched the Sci-Fi channel miniseries Asteroid. Any disaster movie raises a couple questions I am not sure many stop to answer for themselves. How fast can you get ready and be gone if city officials announced an evacuation? There’s stuff you need to take and stuff you need to leave and you are going to have to know the difference. To give you some idea what I am talking about, they say when the Titanic sank there was a woman who went back to her cabin to retrieve two oranges. Things can be replaced. Life cannot. It would probably do everyone good to come up with a plan and place things where they can be gotten to in a timely manner. I keep a bag in my truck but that only has enough clothing for a couple of days. I need to keep a fully stocked kit here at home. I’ll start putting that together in the coming months.

The other question is, what is your route out of town going to be? That depends on where the threat is coming from. When Katrina and Rita hit people started heading this direction NE from the Gulf. And hurricanes that run aground in Texas come in from the Gulf of Mexico with roughly the direction of San Angelo. Fortunately the eye never gets there. But if the Governor announced an evac. while we’d have the means to evacuate, we’d have a hard time getting out. Then there’s the problem of fuel availability and traffic situations but those are things we’d have to deal with anyway.

Here are some links to disaster preparedness-related websites:
Ready dot gov
City of San Francisco’s 72hours dot org
Disaster preparedness and response
American Red Cross’ Prepare dot org
Equipped to Survive^TM Disaster Preparedness
National Center for Disaster Preparedness
A bunch of links from Knowledgehound