Scenario: flood. Your plan?

You are sitting in the office or your normal place of work when you learn there will be 12 feet of water at your location in 1 hour, which will remain for an indefinite time with whatever that implies. Your plan?

My employer would immediately send me and my wife home (we work at the same location), whereupon I would take the elevated highways until I get home. I know that my house is not in any floodplain, but I would wonder about my next paychecks.

Build a boat out of the office furniture with my Leatherman Multitool.

Leave now

Panic - as I'm 110 ft above sea level, with direct hills to the sea - that means we will have a 122ft multi day storm surge, and the east coast will be having problems of biblical proportions

Surfs up!!!

(once a Cali boy, always a Cali boy!)

Edit: Now that I've thought about this, it actually happened a couple days ago. Apparently outside the hospital was a flash flood, and several cars got stranded in a few feet of water. One of the pediatricians had to slog back and spend the night overnight.

Not that I'm sure anything different could have been done (I mean, you can't reverse through traffic to take an alternate route), but it begs the question, what happens when you get caught in that storm surge?

My company went through something like this last year, though they had a couple of hours to work with. Luckily I was not one of those directly impacted.

Main impact was to an engineering team in a downtown location. About 150 people were given 20 minutes to pack personal items and important work papers/references. Work items were limited to what would fit in their office trash can. The trash can and the office computers were placed on the office chairs, wrapped up and rolled to trucks which hauled everything to the building I worked in. Facilities people from the entire company descended on the building that was going to flood and moved nearly everything else to the top couple of floors of the five story building. Several engineering integration and test rigs were also hustled out of the building.

The next morning everyone of those people had a new office / cubicle in my building and access to their computers. Good planning and realistic reactions from the top down.

I think they recovered everything out of the building about 2 weeks later, some things quite a bit worse for wear even though they were not under water. High humidity with high heat around polluted flood waters aren't a good combination for paper or electronics to be anywhere near.

-Eric

I guess I'm cheating. My "office" is an Econoline work van. I'd crank it up and drive to higher ground. Then grab a granola bar out of my SHTF bag and eat it.

I live a couple of miles from where I work, and we're well above any likely flooding. It's such an unlikely scenario that it's hard to take it seriously, but I'd probably go home and either shelter in place, or pack and evacuate.

Agreed, a 12 foot flood at work is not realistic for me. I'm at 300 ft sea level on top of a glacial tarn, my house is at 150 ft sea level on the slope of another tarn 7 miles away. But I'll go along. First half hour spent calling home and to misc. family, begging them to get into a high building to meet the expected flood height. Second half hour moving to the second floor at work and opening the door to the rooftop. Raiding the kitchen for soft drinks and some additional water in whatever I can fill. Then move up to an office on the second floor or rooftop, with my office and my car supplies, and wait and watch. Drive - drive where? To high ground, to my home which according to you would be 200 feet underwater in a half hour? Also the campus my work is at has only 3 major exits to the arterial roads, and only 2 connections to nearby freeways - prior experience in actual emergencies like snow storms has shown that those choke points gridlock pretty quick. No, I'll shelter in place, and hope for the best.

I'll stay in place

I have a "cache" in my office ( Bottled water, tea, coffee milk, biscuits, honey, brown sugar, multitools, flashlights ..etc.)

If I have to sleep at work, I'll collect lab coats and such and use them as bed spreads, pillows, blankets ..etc.

Throw my duffle bag and a paddle into the canoe, then grab a spare paddle and hop into it.

12 feet is a lot of water, I would be cursing about Hydro-1 and their sloppy control over their dams the whole time I was paddling

I'm also in the "all but impossible to flood" category. My work is about 25 miles from the coast, 400' above sea level, with a nice huge river valley leading directly to the shore. I live on the rim of that same valley, also at 400', 11 miles closer to the coast.

So if, somehow, we were going to have 12' of water for an indefinite time, we'd also have one heck of a river running down that valley.

I'd rush home, throw the cat in her carrier, and throw her and what little equipment I've already collected in the car. By then traffic would make it impossible to get off the plateau before water filled the valleys on each side, and cut me off. So I'd continue to load my car with extra canned food/cat food/my computer tower/clothing/etc. until it was filled, then head for the central portion of the plateau.

I'd hunker down there until the water went down/we were evacuated and hope it didn't widen Mission Valley enough to include my home.

The only real possibility to produce 12' of water at my work is some kind of Pacific Ocean impact event, producing a 400'+ Tsunami. If I had an hour's warning of that, I'd do basically the same thing: go home, Cat and current equipment in the car along with 6G jerry can of water and my 3 day's canned food from the cupboard, then join the masses trying to escape.

Most likely I'd end up a statistic in that scenario, but if I had time to rescue Bella, I'd have to at least try.

Been there, done it twice.

The first time was the worst. I drove to work (12 miles) and walked into the office and my boss met me at the door and said the local news said the freeway was being closed in about 15 minutes.

Drove home to high ground and stayed there for four days. Here in the PNW, I simply refuse to live in the flood plain.

My Mom and sister were living with me in a rental mobile home. We had plenty of food and stored water, but we never lost power.

The main problem was the septic. It was 20 years old, had two homes on it, and had never, ever, been cleaned out. With the water saturation of the soil, it was FULL and no longer usable.

I brought in my camping toilet, but we needed to empty it every 24 hrs since my sister is a chronic flusher. (No, my sister doesn't adapt to changing conditions, if you're wondering.) So we emptied it into 5-gallon buckets with lids and lined them up on the deck. On Day 5, the landlady called a septic pumping co and the guy did what should have been done months before, and cleaned out all the buckets, too.

When I bought my place, I prepared for my elderly Mom to be stranded there by herself if my sister or I couldn't get there: plenty of food, plenty of dog and cat food, stored water, extras of most of her meds, battery lanterns (6-volt- easy to hold, lots of light, safe), wood stove, firestarters and kindling nearby, and extra firewood of a size she could handle in a rack just outside the back door (under the deck roof), and an old phone with a cord that wasn't dependent on having power. And some dependable neighbors.

But when I got stuck the second time, I was already home, and the main problem was explaining to my dispatchers in Idaho that NO ONE was going into or coming out of Centralia, and neither were the trains.

If you live at altitude the scenario changes because you must deal with a wider cataclysm. It is a thought experiment.

Because i live on a sailboat, I would sail to a protected spot and anchor up with a lot of chain/rope to ride out the coming of the flood. I would then monitor the radio and try to determine the most survivable spot to stay for a while, perhaps just staying put.

If things were going to be really bad over a fairly wide area, I would sail out of the area.

"...I would sail to a protected spot and anchor up with a lot of chain/rope..."

I have always wondered if that was the best thing to do...

When there have been really bad storms, many boats pull loose from their moorings and are shoved into other boats, docks and right up onto the land. If this happens, your boat isn't likely to be livable, even if isn't in Davy Jones' locker.

What about riding it out at sea???

Sue the Landlubber

I cannot get to sea in an hour, otherwise a good idea.

You are already 5 minutes behind me!

Assuming that the water will be rising the whole time until it reaches 12 feet, I would stay put. Unless I'm very close to higher ground, all transportation will quickly bog down very quickly long before the water gets very deep, and being stuck outside or in a vehicle in rising flood waters is far, far riskier than trying to ride it out in a tall enough building.

On the other hand, if we're talking something like a tsunami, lahar, dam break, or some other situation where the water will arrive all at once, I might consider making a run for it since the ground will be dry before that wall of water arrives.

Not much else to be said, except that by "now" I mean 10 minutes ago. I'd hit the road quickly because where I work 12' of water means Tsunami. We live ~300 ft higher in elevation so once home I'd just tune in and watch the chaos from a distance. I would probably top off the fuel tank on the way home.

Now if getting off the island looked to be iffy due to traffic and everyone else getting the word first, I'd empty my truck's supplies to the upper floor where I work and prepare to camp out. The building can handle it and the second floor is at 20'.

12' in 1 hour in my location.

I would pack up my gear / anything I could get as much as I could... go up my hill until I'm 12' up (not too far it's steep) and then establish a new "home" until water went down.

It's funny you specified 12'... during our last really big flood, that was how much water was sitting on top of the asphalt of Interstate 5 in front of Walmart... some of it in WalMart. It really put a crimp in travel.