One family's story of evacuating from the Fort McMurray wildfire - from The Scientific Parent:
We Are Not Fine. We Are Not Prepared: Escaping Fort McMurray
I don’t know if you’re religious or not, but if you believe in some version of hell my family just drove through it. A few hours ago my family and I escaped the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta which as you may have seen on the news is burning.
We drove through the fire, avoiding dangling electrical wires. We are alive, we have found shelter for tonight in a motel. But like so many others we were unprepared to evacuate when we were told we needed to.
I am going to ask you to do what my family did not do, but wish we did: have an emergency kit ready.
Forest fires are not uncommon in Northern Alberta. Each year many fires occur in the vast Boreal forest that covers the Northern Region of the province, but most of them stay contained, or burn a safe distance from inhabited communities.
Living in Fort McMurray for the past three years (past two years for my wife Amanda and son Odin) we have been witness to these yearly events. Each time, my wife and I will say to each other “We should really think about having an Emergency Preparedness Kit”. We talk about it. We say what a good and practical idea it is. Then, like so many others, it gets put to the wayside and forgotten. We’ll get to it, we say, just like how we’ll get to all the other things in life we say we’ll get to eventually.
Today that forgetfulness put us in danger.
Much more at the site. Author Mathew Clements was able to get his family together and get out but it was a harrowing experience for them and it would have been a lot better if they had a grab-n-go kit already put together. Denial is a very strong human emotion and a lot of people practice it when thinking about disaster preparedness.
The purest definition of a disaster is an event which outstrips your ability to cope. How prepared are you?
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