So, about that 72 Hour Emergency Kit…

For 20 days in May, Pemberton’s Emergency Program Coordinator, Bettina Falloon, posted a step-by-step plan to get your preparedness on, to TheWellnessAlmanac.com. 

Day 1, I was 100% with her. “Get a blue plastic storage bin.” Yep. Can do. I’ll grab that tomorrow when I know what to put in it.

Day 2: “Add water. Four litres per person per day for three days.” Okay! I’ll do that tomorrow when I figure out if I have any water bottles I can spare, or whether those leftover gallon jugs from IRONMAN 2013 are still good.

Day 3: “Put your out-of-area contact person’s number next to the other emergency numbers in your house.” I actually don’t have a list of emergency numbers. This was getting hard. I decided to check out tomorrow’s task before I quit.

Day 4 was about food. This should be doable, I thought, before reading: “Stock the kit with canned meat, dried fruit and a manual can opener.”

Blech. I choose death over eking out survival on rations of tinned sardines.

And, that’s pretty much where my Emergency Preparedness planning ended.

I asked my workmate, fellow Pembertonian and Winds of Change contributor, Gary Martin, across our screens one day: “So, do you guys have an emergency kit?”

“Nah,” he said. “My emergency plan has always been, ‘Arghh, run for the hills. Oh, hang on, we’re in the hills.’”

Then he clarifies: their camping gear is stored neatly in the garage, ready to go at any point in time, and their car is decked out with a winter emergency kit, in case of snowstorm breakdown with water, food, blankets, matches, headlamps.

Camping gear and survival gear bear an uncanny resemblance to one another. We have most of the recommended supplies to survive the first 72 hours after an emergency, should the power go out or roads be cut off, too. Not in a nice labeled blue Tupperware box, granted, but given the higher probability of us going camping this summer than facing an emergency situation, the status quo prevailed.

Fast forward to last Monday, July 14. Pemberton was hitting record-breaking temperatures and we were cutting up yet another watermelon when my neighbour suddenly rapped on the door.

“There’s a fire up the road,” he said, breathlessly. “I can see the flames from my house. You might want to, you know, get prepared.”

You know, to evacuate.

That was not a moment I was prepared for.

It’s a fascinating experience to be wading through heat, with the sky full of smoke, feeling a little choked up thinking about your thoughtful neighbour, while pondering, what do I take and what do I leave? What matters? What do I need? What can I walk away from?

Within half an hour, we had vehicles packed with the items that made the cut. (No sleeping bags. In fact, nothing from the camping kit. “We’re not going camping,” said my husband when I grabbed for them. He was no doubt thinking, once again, of the unfair burden of having a writer on your Apocalypse team. “Put together some clothes so you can still go to work if the house burns down. Get the passports and important documents. Pack up the hard drive and the laptop.”

Really? I thought as I followed his instructions. I don’t need to fill the bathtub with water? This is just so confusing.

If we are defined by the things we’d take from a building about to burn, I’d be described as an “impractical minimalist” and “much less sentimental than expected.” But with the sudden dawning that, with the Pemberton Music Festival and IRONMAN constraining traffic flow on Highway 99 over back to back weekends, a wildfire here could be catastrophic, (something the province is highly attuned to, which is why the eager forest fire fighting crews stationed in Pemberton have not been deployed to elsewhere in BC this summer), I don’t think I want to add “underprepared” to that description.

With the vehicles packed, we stood in the shade outside and watched water bombers circle overhead, slowly bringing the two hectare fire under control. By evening, Jay and John from Pemberton Fire Rescue assured us that the Coastal Fire Service had mostly contained the blaze and a crew from Mount Currie would be watching over the site all night. We unpacked the cars, and I switched my computer back on. Google Search: “The Wellness Almanac Emergency Preparedness.”