I can see no downside to a BOB. Better to have something than nothing. But were I ever to have need (and opportunity, please God) to bug out among the critical items I'd take are a few very informative books on survival. That and a trailer full of gasoline would be very helpful.

Living in a major metropolitan area on the east coast (Washington, D.C. in my case) certainly provides a perspective on the prospects of bugging out (and on living in a major, the major, terror target). Even a normal evening rush hour is instructive and on occasion when sitting still in I-66 westbound traffic jams on Fridays while trying to get away for a weekend I have considered what a mass evac of DC would look like.

Pretty grim. Even if everyone remained civilized (on 9/11 when there was much uncertainty for hours, DC did empty out in terms of commuters within a few hours, in a remarkably orderly and polite manner).

Cannot even begin to imagine a mass evac of a large portion of the east coast. There are 100 million people in the DC-Boston corridor.

I came to this website via camping gear and to preparedness awareness via a week of rolling blackouts during a succession of early 1990s ice storms, Y2K and 9/11.

Agree with the observations that it seems silly to have Armageddon gear without first building the capacity to cope with garden variety natural disasters.