What to do Before the Disaster Strikes
A brief guide on preparing for the worst in our increasingly disastrous world
It’s been one year since Altadena burned to the ground. One year since an electric tower sparked in a dry canyon during a rainless season and destroyed what tens of thousands of people knew as their life. If you drive east or west along the 210 freeway and look north, you’ll see that the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, while slowly greening up again, still remains largely gray, ashed-out, like the non-playable area of a video game.
In this year of recovery, I have often thought about what I would tell people who were in my position pre-fire. People who don’t know what’s coming for them, who think they’re safe from disasters they see happening elsewhere, even if they can sense the slight hint of danger lurking around the corner. I was always afraid of wildfire and have even written about the deep sense of knowing I lived with from a young age that someday I would lose my home to the flames. But even that fear and that knowing did not truly prepare me.
I bought a house in the foothills but I thought we were safe because we were on the other side of the street that marked the beginning of the high fire severity zone. I thought the large streets that divided our town into smaller sub-neighborhoods would serve as fire breaks. I thought, surely the fire department would never let this fire jump Lake Ave, jump Loma Alta Dr, would never let the fire come down past Cobb Estate. I thought there were protocols in place. An alert system. Water tankers. Whatever machinery might be able to withstand the wind and still fight the fire. When I left our home the night of January 7th, the Eaton Fire was still burning east of us, blowing the opposite direction. Winds were 60-100mph. I imagined a brigade of trucks lined up on the major streets surrounding our homes, blasting the flames, doing whatever it took to stop the destruction of property and, most importantly, protecting human life.
I was wrong.
There were no fire trucks. There was no alert system. No one came to save us. When my next door neighbors left their home at 3:30am, their yard was already on fire and we still hadn’t received an evacuation notice. No firefighters in sight, they said. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.
I have spent most of my professional career writing and researching and teaching about systems of power, of government, of infrastructure, and one of my primary take-aways from that work is that the most important systems we have, the systems we can actually rely on, are the systems we build together in our communities. These systems are usually not formal. They don’t have legal status. Their rules aren’t inscribed somewhere for crossreference. These are the systems we make precisely because our other systems are insufficient and sometimes even run contrary to our needs.
When no alert came to inform us of the fire’s progress toward our home, our neighbors who stayed behind sent us text updates. When no one told our neighbors to evacuate, I stayed up all night checking in, trying to make sure they made it out.
The next day, when no law enforcement or government agency could tell us the status of our home, it was our neighbor’s son who braved the smoke and sent us photographic evidence of our loss. That first image of our burned down house will forever be seared in my brain, but if it weren’t for our neighbor, it would have taken days to confirm our loss. A loss we need to confirm in order to file an insurance claim and to begin the long, devastating task of beginning our lives over again.
When I think about how to help prepare people for the ever-impending intersections of disaster in our American lives—wildfire, floods, hurricanes, ICE raids, pandemics, the gutting of our social systems—the loudest thought I hear in my own head is Know Your Neighbors. It is the first and most important instruction I could give anyone bracing for whatever circumstance might throw at them. I know people who survived the deadly Eaton Fire that claimed 19 lives precisely because their neighbors knew they might need help evacuating. I know people whose homes were spared the flames because their neighbors soaked them down and risked their own lives to do so without a firetruck in sight. I know people who have successfully fought eviction because they rallied with their neighbors to maintain their tenants rights. Neighbors who started GoFundMe’s for other neighbors when they were in need of funds with nowhere else to turn. It’s our old neighbor Kate who found us an apartment after the fire while we were traumatized and buried in paperwork, and our old neighbor Karen who met us in Huntington Park to help us translate when my husband needed to buy a new motorcycle off Facebook Marketplace so he could go back to work since only one of our vehicles survived the fire.
Knowing your neighbors is easier said than done. We don’t often live lives conducive to knowing one’s neighbors. We work many hours to afford our mortgages and rents. We use our spare energy to cook for our families and tackle our chores and find small pleasures when we can. But I promise you there are ways to build neighbors into all of these routines of our lives. Even if you’re shy. Even if you’re new to your neighborhood. A lot of it starts with giving yourself a reason to be outside. This can be uncomfortable, but many good things can come from cultivating your ability to sit in discomfort.
If you have a dog, you have to take that dog outside to walk, to go to the bathroom, to look at a squirrel. You might meet another neighbor with a dog on your walk. Or maybe just a neighbor who likes dogs. Small conversations that repeat over time become routines, rituals, and the next thing you know, you might trade phone numbers with a neighbor. Maybe it’s just for emergencies. Maybe it’s to exchange dog care or set up a playdate for your kids. There is no secret to the kinds of conversations that lead to building community. If you talk about the world you both share, you will find a point of connection. Even if you find points of disagreement. One of the more challenging aspects of building community is figuring out how to navigate difference, and for this there is no quick solution. Just patience, tolerance, curiosity, a solid relationship with your own boundaries, and a willingness to respect the boundaries of others.
My husband usually meets neighbors when he is outside working on our car or his motorcycle. Especially when he lived in a neighborhood where many people worked on their own cars on public streets, he was able to connect over a shared desire to troubleshoot, sometimes swapping tools and knowledge. This is, in fact, how he met the neighbors across from where we live now in our little apartment post-fire, and that neighbor now brings us bread from the bakery where he sometimes works. These relationships don’t have to be deep. But the more connected you are to the people around you, the higher your chance of survival in a disaster.
Beyond knowing your neighbors (which is my number one piece of disaster preparedness advice), I’ve spent a year thinking about what I wish I had done differently to prepare for a wildfire that destroyed my home and town and here is what I would recommend:
Insurance is necessary but also complicated. When we bought our house, we were required to get homeowners insurance in order to carry a mortgage. I had no idea what insurance actually covered and there was already so much paperwork that went into buying a house, I just didn’t look too deeply into any of it. We were located immediately south of a high fire severity zone and in the state of California where insurance carriers are pulling out of the market, so I was mostly just worried about getting insurance at all. I asked the neighbors on our street who they had for insurance and then called that company. Some of our neighbors, though, have had to turn to the CA Fair Plan as a last resort. Not all insurance companies function equally and it only takes a quick google to see how different insurance companies have handled different disasters.
Homeowners without a mortgage are not required to maintain an insurance policy, and since insurance policies can be incredibly expensive, some people may not be able to afford insurance. This is part of what makes insurance a complicated aspect of disaster preparedness. Relying on a primarily for-profit system to support you in a disaster isn’t ideal, and you can’t afford what you can’t afford.
If you are a renter, your landlord may or may not require renters insurance. When I was a renter, I sometimes carried it and sometimes didn’t depending on how much room I had in my budget at a given time.
If you CAN afford insurance, even if it’s not required for you as a renter or a homeowner without a mortgage, it can be the difference between recovering from a disaster or not, despite the delays and denials many insured face. What I did not know the day our house burned down is that insurance policies have what is called Loss of Use coverage, and this money pays for you to live in a comparable place to the one you had while you are displaced. There is a limit on how much you can spend or how many months they cover, but it at least buys you some time with a roof over your head because if you are a homeowner with a mortgage, those monthly payments are still due, whether your house exists anymore or not, and if you are a renter in a contaminated home, sometimes your landlord still demands rent, even if you can’t live there (this is illegal, but still potentially requires you to battle them in court). The tough part is finding a rental that is low enough in cost that you can stretch your loss of use money for as long as possible. For us, this meant moving into a place much smaller than the home we had, but the cost to rent a comparable place to our home would have eaten up all our loss of use money within a little over a year. We’re looking at a three year recovery timeline, from the date of the fire to moving back home, so we needed to stretch that money as much as possible.
Check your coverage limits. Almost everyone I know in Altadena who had insurance is underinsured by a few hundred thousand dollars. The cost to rebuild a home in reality doesn’t always align with the cost an insurance company assumes. Coverage A is what you want to look at. It sets the bar for all your remaining coverages, and will cover the majority of your payout. Total losses (as in, your whole home is gone) are easier to navigate from an insurance perspective than damaged homes where you might have to argue with insurance over what they will and will not cover. United Policyholders can help with this.
Know your evacuation zone. This one is pretty controversial in my town because most of us never received a formal evacuation notice and many people died because of it. A friend of mine had told me to download the app Watch Duty right after the fire started so that I could set up alerts for my zone, but by the time my house burned down, my zone was still not notified, no yellow warning or red mandatory evacuation issued. We learned later that an elderly neighbor one street south of us never made it out. Nonetheless, knowing your evacuation zone and knowing how to check for alerts can be crucial, but works best in combination with knowing your neighbors.
Make a plan ahead of time. We did not have a plan. By the grace of god and my college best friend who lives in Windsor Hills and had just completed the conversion of her garage into an accessory dwelling unit (tiny little apartment), we ended up with somewhere safe and free to stay for as long as we needed to get our feet under us. This is a blessing for which I will never be able to share enough gratitude. Had the fire hit a few months earlier, there would be no converted garage and I’m not sure where we would have gone. Having pets, children, elders, and/or a disability makes emergency shelter much more challenging. And it’s not always clear how wide a disaster will hit, so your emergency place to stay might also be disaster impacted. There is no perfect way to prepare for this. But in general it’s good to consider your options in advance, whether they’re a friend or family member’s place nearby or far away or a list of affordable hotels in the area.
Part of this plan can and should include checking on your neighbors. My neighbors who lived in their home for nearly 50 years happened to own a giant RV (a lot of Altadenans seem to have campers and RVs and I now see those vehicles so differently post-fire as tiny mobile evacuation centers). They offered to take me and our pets with them in the RV if need be. In retrospect, I am glad I took my own car, because at least that way one of our vehicles survived, but had my circumstances been different, like if I didn’t have a working vehicle, going with them would have saved my life.
Make a list of things you’ll evacuate with and tape a hard copy inside of a cupboard (keep a copy on your phone if you have a smart phone). As I was evacuating, I called a friend who has lived in fire zones. She calmly walked me through what to take with me: medications, our computers and phones and their chargers, all sets of keys to our vehicles, face masks, cash, important documents, food and supplies for our pets, non-perishable snacks for us, a couple days worth of clothes. In a panic, I grabbed what was visible, not what I thought we would want in case everything else disappeared forever. Because of her guidance, we didn’t have to replace IDs, the house deed, car titles, and other necessary documents after the fire, and we had the basics with us.
But I wish I had made another list, the sentimental list, 10-15 irreplaceable objects, the family heirlooms, the things that helped tether us to the selves we used to be: my favorite band shirt from 2008 that I slept in so much, it became like a second skin; our childhood stuffed animals; the baby book my mom made me that documented my first years of life; my husband’s grandfather’s suitcase; the microwavable heating pack filled with rice that my grandma used until she passed away; things given to us by people who are dead now. I only had my one car (my husband had taken the bus across town for an appointment earlier that day) and it had to fit the dog, the cats, and me, plus our necessary items. But there was room for this sentimental stuff, and those beloved things I left behind will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Photograph your belongings and home. This one is hard, so I hesitate to even suggest it. As I was leaving our house for the last time, I snapped pictures of each room. I sent these to insurance later to help corroborate our loss claim. But these photos are pretty tough to look at, and what is missing from them is photos of the insides of cabinets, closets, and drawers, where most of our belongings lived.
When you claim loss of belongings in a disaster, insurance wants a detailed list of everything you lost, down to the paperclips. They want to know the brand and the age and the quality and the quantity. How many pairs of pants, how old, what brand, estimated cost. This is called the inventory list and it is the worst document I have ever had to compile (I’ve honestly not completed it and I don’t know if I can). In the worst period of your life, you will be asked to detail everything you’ll never see again, give it a monetary value, and watch while insurance tells you it’s worth less than you think. This list requires a ton of research, a good memory, and photos to look back on to help you piece it all together.
Now that we have acquired new belongings post-fire, I cannot say I have made a list of these new acquisitions. I keep meaning to, but even making a list of things you can see and hold in present time is exhausting, daunting, and feels not worth the effort. Maybe someday I’ll do it. One of my biggest regrets is not keeping a spreadsheet record of my 2,000+ books in my personal library. I’ve tried looking through photos of my bookshelves, but I can’t always make out the titles or remember some of the books. In the future, I will probably use https://www.librarything.com/ to make a catalogue of my books. They are what I miss most of my belongings, a record of my intellectual and creative journey from teenage-hood through an English PhD and beyond.
There is another kind of preparedness list I would like to mention, and that’s a list of things you might prepare to do to help people living through a disaster if you yourself are not living through a disaster at the time. This list is so personal so it will differ from person to person and is really just based on the support our community provided that was most helpful to us:
Offering a place to stay. Not everyone has space to accommodate others, but having a friend offer us a place to stay without us having to ask made all the difference that first night and in the weeks that followed.
Food delivery gift cards. I am usually someone who resists these kinds of services, but my colleagues worked together to send us a bunch of DoorDash gift cards and we ate off of those gift cards for months after the fire. First when we had no cooking supplies—no pots or pans or spices or dry goods—and then later when we were too exhausted from fire recovery to cook for ourselves. We prefer home cooked meals to take out, but sadly when loved ones cooked for us immediately post-fire, we weren’t always hungry (stress can make it hard to eat) and the food would sometimes go to waste.
Donating useful goods. A lot of well-meaning people donated a lot of stuff after the fire, most of which was clothing. Many disaster recovery experts have called these donations “the disaster after the disaster.” For us, the most useful things people gave us were gently used bath and dish towels, clothes that actually fit us both in size and style, new socks and underwear, and luggage (a former student of mine brought us two huge and one medium suitcase that her former employer had donated and they were filled with toiletries and a year later we are still making our way through those toiletries and it was so nice not to have to think about buying things like moisturizer or face wash, even though pre-fire I was so fussy about what kinds of face products I used).
Donating what I would consider luxuries. This one is sort of complicated but as I mentioned, I lost my entire library of books. Rebuying books was absolutely not a financial priority for us post-fire as we struggled to imagine how we might afford the bigger things, like a new car or a rebuilt house. But some of my fellow writers and writing teachers from my job got me a gift card to a local bookstore, which gave me permission to buy some books without feeling irresponsible about how I was spending the money. The gift card (vs. actual books) gave me agency over what I bought and when, which is important because agency is in short supply after a disaster and so is the space to store new things. It turns out those books are what helped me slowly come back to myself in the months that followed, as reading has always grounded me and located me in the world. Each person will have their own version of this kind of stuff. For my husband it was his tools. For someone else it might be vinyl records or art supplies or something else.
Setting up a GoFundMe or some other way for people to give money. Direct cash assistance is the single most needed resource in a disaster. People still have bills to pay, and non-profits/philanthropists/the government aren’t often quick to give cash to residents. But cash provides immediate relief and, like I mentioned above, agency. Having agency over how you use your resources helps you regain a sense of dignity, and both agency and dignity are massively underrated necessities in and outside of a disaster. One of my students asked me if she could set up a GoFundMe and I was so resistant to the idea but that GoFundMe is what allowed us to buy a new used car, pay the security deposit on our apartment, and buy homegoods and work clothes before insurance money arrived. And since we will need all of our insurance money (even that money designated to replace personal belongings) to rebuild our home, that extra bit of donated money made a world of difference.
Each kind of disaster necessitates its own level of preparation, but every disaster intersects with many of the same systems. The question becomes: what systems, what safety nets, have proven themselves to be reliable across different kinds of disasters and which systems often fail the people who assumed those very systems would catch them safely in a crisis? One final last tip would be to think about the systems you rely on to survive now: where you get your food, your drinking water, your medication, your shelter. Think about how you access social and emotional support. What do you think happens to these systems in a disaster? What can they withstand, and what would cause them to crumble? At this point in history, the U.S. (and the whole globe) has seen so many different kinds of disasters. We have seen supply chains break down, law enforcement occupy cities and terrorize civilians for political purposes, utility companies neglect powerlines that lead to devastating fires, landlords that abandon their tenants to slum conditions. What does it take to survive the many-pronged disasters that shaped our present and threaten our future? The more curious we can be about these questions, the more we can learn about the world we live in right now, the more resilient the systems we build for each other might become.
To my fire survivors, it is only being in community and shared grief with you that I have made it through the year. It is you who know what it is like to walk into a big box store after losing everything and freeze at the sight of so much—rows and rows of products, most of which we never needed to begin with. You who have also walked for months in other peoples’ donated clothing, whatever you could find that fit well enough, hit by wave after wave of realization that “oh this thing I loved is gone” and also “oh this other thing I loved is gone.” We also know that there is no amount of preparation that will prepare you for the truly unimaginable, erratic long haul of grief you have to face in these circumstances. In our family, my husband and I say to each other sometimes, “baby, I’m sorry your house burned down.” Him to me and then me to him. To all of you, I’m sorry your house burned down. Or became a toxic, uninhabitable museum of your old life. All I know is that there is an unfolding future ahead of us, and that we can move toward whatever that is together.
Thank you for sharing this wisdom. Sending love.
Beautifully written. Raw & real. Thanks for sharing