David Paulison of FEMA says "Nobody does disasters better than California". Yeah, maybe you and Heckuva-Job-Brownie should come out here and take a few lessons from the masters.
The difference is, our annual disaster drill isn’t a dry run like other states – between the fires and the earthquakes, our annual practice is the real thing, all hands on deck, this one really counts. Our state Office of Emergency Services has matters well under control before FEMA even knows there’s a problem. We don’t just have theory on how to move a thousand trucks of bottled water to the far end of the state; we’ve done it for real and often enough to have experienced all the possible difficulties.
My family in SoCal evacuated sequentially over the past few days: one aunt went to another aunt’s house. From there, they were evacuated to one son’s house, and from there to the other son’s, who wisely lives far enough from the other family members that he’s safe when they’re threatened (and vice versa). All well-planned (the aunts have planned their evacuations for decades, and have used those plans more than once) and orderly. Another cousin loaded the valuables into the RV and is camped out on a beach, again, all according to plan.
When I lived in San Diego, we had a canyon fire come within a mile of our house. Our biggest worry was whether one side of the family would be offended if we refugeed to the other’s family instead. We had a list of what to take with us, and were calmly boxing it up and setting it on the couch, positive that our list contained everything we would need, because it was based on the list my aunt had used for decades of evacuations from her house.
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