While driving around this morning, I happened to hear an NPR report on The Burning House, a site whose proprietor poses the seemingly simple question, “If the house were burning down and you had to get out right now, what would you take with you?” Good question: if you have to grab and run, what do you grab?
Turns out that’s not such a simple question, as Here and Now’s Robin Young learned when she interviewed proprietor Foster Huntington. The answer to “what would you take” is surprisingly personal, and it reflects a lot about an individual’s character, priorities, and social circumstances.
Various PF bloggers have held forth on the idea that you should have a box of key documents and cards ready to grab in an emergency—sorry, friends, but I can only recall having read those posts and don’t remember where they surfaced. I imagine some of my faves have written about these issues: J.D. Roth and the Ineffable Evan, both men of an eminently practical turn of mind, and possibly Frugal Scholar, who has lived through a major natural catastrophe and whose daughter was in Tuscaloosa during the recent terrifying storm.
What jumped to my mind the instant Robin Young asked “what would you take with you” was the dog. That’s all: the dog. The prospect of rummaging in the office closet for the box of treasures as the draperies are catching flame…not good. Snabbing the laptop or disconnecting the desktop and hauling one or both out the window (along with me and the dog): amazingly bad idea. Grab the dog and run!
Here’s what I think about this business of rescuing crucial documents: Carbonite. Carbonite and a scanner.
Get yourself a subscription to Carbonite’s lowest-end data backup software (amazingly cheap) and a decent scanner, which you probably already have on your printer. Tattoo the Carbonite password on the bottom on the bottom of your foot, so as never to lose or forget it.
Scan every important document to disk: family members’ birth certificates, parents’ death certificates, Social Security card, current credit cards (front and back), receipts for the wife’s diamond engagement ring, whatever. Scan every other important receipt, tax return, and crucial financial document. While you’re at it, scan your wedding pictures and all those historic family photos. Photograph every room in the house, so as to record the superb furniture with which you have decorated, and while you’re at it, photograph all your jewelry and artwork, too. Now, store every JPEG and PDF to disk. Carbonite will automatically back them up.
Henceforth, it will also automatically back up every damnfool thing you write to disk. This is good, because it means you don’t have to rescue your computer from fire, wind, rain, or flood.
There really aren’t many documents whose originals you need to keep: probably your birth certificate (which you can replace) and the old family Bible are about it. Get a bank safe deposit box for those items, or else buy a truly fireproof safe to stash them and bolt it to the floor.
It probably would be good to keep a few gallons of water in the car, along with a hidden chunk of change or some cigarettes that can be used for barter, if you’re of the survivalist turn of mind.
There you go. Now every material thing you need is retrievable. The furniture and the tchotchkes are irrelevant. All you have to do is gather the living beings and get the hell out.
What would you grab on the way out of a burning building?
Image: dvs’s photostream on Flickr. Creative Commons
Your first thought was the same as mine: grab the dog and run. All the paperwork on accounts, etc. isn’t really that necessary. Now, if something happened to *me* then there would be problems. I really need to do some estate planning.
Me, too. Some of the other things would be a pain to replace, but the dog is non-negotiable. And my glasses if they weren’t already on my face. Everything else is ultimately just stuff.
We have a little fireproof safe.
It’s a good idea to have a designated “meeting spot” –that way, people don’t run back into a dangerous situation to search for someone.
Just the cat ma’am, just the cat.
From experience, we got our kids out, and our dog, looked at the Christmas gifts under the tree, and said, forget it! It’s just stuff!
Here in San Diego, we’re prone to WildFires. In that case, we have a bit more time to pack. In the case of the house on fire NOW, yes, just get out.
With a bit more time to prepare, I’d get the family out, and pack the car with pictures, art, and a box, high up in the garage, with irreplaceable Christmas ornaments, many handmade by those who loved us, who are no longer present.
I am sure I’d have to find my dog scared to death in a closet somewhere LOL carbonite is a great tool – also check out DropBox I have just gotten into it and its FANTASTIC and for the most part F-R-E-E!
We have a little safe in the basement that I keep closed. I’m hoping that if anything happened it could be rescued, but who knows if it would hold up and how long it would even take to find?
I do like the idea of photographing everything in your room and backing that up.
I started using Amazon Cloud to store backup copies of all my important documents and pictures, but taking some additional pictures would be key and something maybe I’ll do after our new little one is born and I’m home for awhile helping.
Grabbing all ten cats won’t be that easy. I better start to think about an evacuation plan.
Yipe! Only one of us has kids? Well, obviously, getting the urchins out of the house is the first priority. And Frugal Scholar’s point that you should have a rendezvous point is well taken.
Learned an interesting thing about dogs from the late, great Anna the German Shepherd: a dog can be trained to exit a building when a fire alarm goes off.
By accident, Anna learned to go to the kitchen door and wait to be let out (if it wasn’t already open). The first time the smoke alarm went off when she was a pup, there actually was hot, smoking grease on the stove, just on the cusp of flaring into flame. The first thing I did was chase her out the door. From that single incident, she always went direct to the back door every time the toaster set the smoke alarm off.
She never went to the dog door, unfortunately. But it would be easy to train a dog to go to the dog door at the first sign of fire, simply by setting off the alarm on purpose. That would give you plenty of time to guide the animal to the preferred exit.
Cats are another matter. Me, I wouldn’t delay to search out ten cats. A dog often will come to its humans if it thinks something is seriously awry, because that’s what its pack instinct tells it to do. The less social cat will flee or, failing that, try to hide. A cat that doesn’t want to be found is almost impossible to find. When the carpet’s ablaze, you just don’t have time to be searching up inside the bedsprings where the cat has ripped off the dust covering and made its way up inside the frame.
By the way, one of my students — a budding firefighter — pointed out last semester that retrofitting a house with sprinklers is not all THAT expensive (your insurance company will reward you, too, with lowered premiums), and that people do not die in houses with sprinkler systems. The new systems are unobtrusive, with recessed fixtures. He said he wouldn’t live in a house that wasn’t sprinklered. And he could be right.
I would take the most important things–the people, the pets, and the Alexa book. My child Alexa died in 1986 from cancer at the age of 7. The Alexa book is memories and precious photos. We had a fire seven years ago and we took–the people, the pets, and the Alexa book. Come to think of it, scanning those precious pages is in order. Thanks for the reminder.
Oh, my, Christine. I’m so sorry for such a grievous loss. And very glad you were able to rescue this treasure. Definitely scan the whole book…and back up the images off-site. There are several services besides Carbonite–Mac’s MobileMe provides server space, as does Mozy and Dropbox, among others.
I’m not keen on backing my personal data up to a cloud somewhere as anything can be hacked and/or most people can be bribed.
I have a 380 GB solid state hard drive that we back up our files on, partitioned for mine and the Mrs. PC. It goes with me in my briefcase when ever I leave the house.
What I have not done is 2 things.
Making a photographic record of the inside of our house.
Scanning all the documents in our fireproof safe that lives under the waterbed frame (a tough spot to get to in a fire)
I’m sure the safe is indeed fire proof but it may get hot enough inside for some of those 60 year old documents to ignite or just crumble.
Thanks for this eye opener as I will take care of these 2 things that need to be done.
On another note some friends had a house fire a couple years ago. They lived in a manufactured home that has a crawl space underneath. They had a water softener installed and workers had to go into the crawl space to rework some plumbing.
When they were done they left their work light under the house still turned on.
It was a halogen work light, very hot bulb.
Two weeks later the house was on fire.