in preparation for an evacuation you might look at your communication requirements,(]1) between family members within and outside the impacted area...something other than cell phone. have a phone tree..who contacts who, where to meet...and (2)a good source of real time intelligence.. an ability to monitor the on-scene communications of forestry and fire agencies...might give you a head start on the evacuation process...(3)have a predetermined stay-go requirement...when a criteria is met we will do this action...eg..if the wind is from the north west, and the fire line crosses county road 25 we move north on state 44.
when I see videos of the California woods fires I always wondered why those homes that have obvious swimming pools don't have a copper piped "rainbird" sprinkler system on the roof,mister heads on the soffit, and a propane powered alternator that can run a pump supplied by the swimming pool, possibly triggered by a remote radio/cell phone call..regards
A couple comments on your points.
One of the lessons learned during the 07 wildfires here is that cell phone voice communication was unreliable and sporatic because everyone relied on it during the evacution and it overloaded the system. But text messages, because they require less bandwidth and could wait till bandwidth was available, went through fairly well. Some services (Verizon, and probably several others)can text to and from email addresses. A tech-savvy family could use this in place of an "out of town contact" to keep everyone in the loop.
Several of the Ramona residents during the fires turned on their sprinkler systems before evacuating. It actually sucked so much water that the firefighters had to go around and turn off the water to these places in order to get enough pressure for their hoses.
Previous Topic
Index
