Washington Resistance Army wrote:I can't blame people for staying honestly. As much as I want to say I'd be rational and just evacuate I probably would end up staying and try to save everything.
Geneviev wrote:I'd be tempted. It would be stupid, but I don't know that I could just leave Leaves of Grass behind. I do understand the people who choose to stay.
I can certainly understand the temptation (as mentioned before, this season is not my first wildfire rodeo,) but the important thing is your personal safety. Material possessions can be replaced,
you can't be. Plus staying behind not only puts yourself in danger, it also takes firefighting resources away from protecting structures to try to rescue you. So you're not just endangering yourself, it's also putting the firefighters in unnecessary danger as well and making it more difficult for them to try and protect the homes since their priority is protecting lives first,
then property. With the lives safely out of the area then they can focus entirely on that structure protection. Unless you have the necessary training and proper equipment, trying to stay behind and defend your home yourself just puts the place in even greater danger as counter-intuitive as that seems. Best you can really hope to do with a garden hose is to spray down your house before you leave, but with the kind of heat a wildfire can produce the actual help that does is pretty negligible.
It also depends on where you are in relation to the fire. If you're in an already inaccessible area, such as up in the mountains or a canyon where you only have a couple of roads in and out of the region, you need to evacuate much earlier; simply because it will take you longer to get out of the danger zone. You have more miles to go to reach safety and those access points will quickly be choked by both outbound traffic that waited too long and fire equipment trying to get in plus the possibility of the fire cutting those routes off entirely. You've got a lot more leeway to wait to evacuate at the last minute if you're in an apartment or suburban home in an area with myriad escape routes, plus in a large suburban area (NOT a small town!) you also won't have to travel nearly as far to reach safety. And in both cases, if you're alert to your surrounding conditions and already prepared to get out in a hurry before the moment of crisis, that gives you a lot more leeway to rescue a lot more of your most valuable possessions and mementos before you need to get out. Last time I had to evac I was able to pack up a
lot of my personal stuff because I was aware the fire was heading my direction more than an hour before it was on my doorstep. Good thing too, because the flames were on the hills right above us before the evac orders even arrived because of how fast-moving it was.