Eugene,

Feels good to be organized, doesn't it?

-Blast

If I might pick your brain a little more

Do you have an evacuation/bug out plan in plane? While most situations you would remain home, I'm in an older neighborhood and there are a lot of people who refuse to work who are living on government assistance and abusing that system. Their basic attitude is everything is public, be it my back yard or the contents of my shed or whatever. So if any large situation happens they will be expecting a handout so those situations I need to bug out rather than be put in a situation where I have to defend my family and have to deal with legal issues later. I have a primary location already, my parents farm but its 250 miles to there.
So some of the things I need to work out now are meeting places, if my wife needs to leave the house while I'm at work where can I catch up to her at. I had thought about some of the travel centers we stop at while going that way but in a NOLA situation they will probably have a lot of people stopping to get gas so I'm thinking we need to stay away from them. I'm trying to decide what would make a good meet up location.

Eugene,

We used to have a bugout plan then Hurricane Rita shattered our illusions.

Let me clarify that some.

If all of Houston is trying to escape it'll need to be something more dangerous than a class 4 hurricane to get us bugging out. That being said, we'll load the Honda Pilot with water, food, gas (tied on top disguised in old suitcases), important papers, guns, a chemical toilet and join the streaming hordes. Both our vehicles are permanently stocked with maps, gear and some (3-6 liters) water. I top the gas off every time I've used 1/4 tank, DW always refills the Pilot at 1/2 tank. In an evacuation we'd add much more water plus the other stuff mentioned. We have friends in Austin, TX (three hours away). If we need to go farther we'll head north to family in Iowa or Minnesota. We've made that drive several times before and know it well.

DW is a stay-at-homer and I work 13 miles straight down the road. Between us is a mixture of suburbia and rural land. There's a railroad track that runs directly from my work to our neighborhood plus assorted other possible on-road choices. The girls are in preschool ten hours a week, otherwise they are with DW. The preschool is less than two miles away from home. If something happened while I was at work and we had to leave seperately we have out-of-state contacts set up who we can both check in with (assuming phones work )to see where each other is. That being said, it would take A LOT to get DW/DD1/DD2 to leave home without me. She'd rather hide than run.

I actually think our most likely reason to bug out would be due to a release of hazardous materials from a train derailment. If that were the case the area of effect would be relatively small and we wouldn't have to deal with all of Houston trying to run. In this circumstance we have a checklist in the binder for emergency evacuation. It lists what we need to grab, where it is, what priority it is and whose responsibility it is to grab it. However, a trial run shows it takes 20-minutes or so to do everything on the list, due mainly to trying to handle DD1/DD2 at the same time.

Sidenote: Thanks to the show "Jericho" DD1 knows if she ever sees a mushroom cloud she needs to get inside and turn off the A/C unit. Not bad for a 4-yr old.

Hopefully this helped a little, if not please ask for clarification. I like talking about this.

-Blast

p.s. The reason for taking the guns mentioned above would be to keep others from getting them. They would remain locked away in the vehicle. During the Rita evacuation there didn't seem to be much need of a gun. However, if the situation dictated it a pistol would be with me.

Eugene,

In your case do you have someone out of state that could be a mutual contact between you and your wife/kids if you get seperated? That might be your best bet.

I would avoid travel stations/rest stops. They'll be overrun. This may sound a little creepy, but do a search for graveyards along your expected paths. They are usually easy to find, have plenty of parking, and are much less likely to be overrun by refugees. Good ones also have a hose or other water source somewhere on the grounds.

Something to think about.

-Blast

My parents are on the farm but the only communication is a phone line so its not reliable enough to count on, even during normal times it doesn't work half the time.
My long term plans are to have some solar/wind power generation on top the farm and put up a ham repeater and get my license so I can relay messages down to it via other repeaters, its the second highest point in the county and you can see over other mountain tops for miles so that should work well.
I was thinking things like state parks hopefully no one will be thinking about recreation during whatever causes us to need to bug out.

How would bugging out to a state park be better than bugging out to the farm?

Sue

The question was finding a meeting place to continue on to the farm.

I know this is a good format to use because of the effort I am having to put out to get the Lousy-anna version of the info that Blast has already found in the Houston, Tx area. It must be nice to live in a state that has a functioning, working Office of Emergency Management.

Ah, the beginnings of "The Blast Family Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan"

Between this thread and another I started "Family Records Organizer", I have been compiling all sorts of info and came across a beautifully simple way of improving my records for "Hospitals". This may help some others interested in this topic.
I have never been admitted to one near my current home, so I logged onto my company healthcare providers website, under "looking for a doctor". I quickly found I could run a search for hospital within 10, 20,50 miles of my zipcode who are in my insurance network... another big consideration in many scenarios.
It spit out a list of 25 hospitals within 20 miles, in my network, with full contact information, links and a map function. It allowed for prinint out as well as setting up in a PDF.
Your insurance provider may not offer this feature,or you may not have access to healthcare insurance but I am sure most of the "find a doctor" websites could provide some this info painlessly.
I even can run a list of Hospitals for my kids away at school, just in case.
Hope this helps someone...