Well, you better be rotating your meds and food every so often or they will go bad. If you forget, and grab your bag anyway thinking that you’ll be in the clear, you’re worse off than if you had grabbed fresh items at the time of disaster.
This one is a tad more psychological, but if you’ve mentally prepped yourself to grab the bag in case of impending doom, you may be taking chances if the danger really is imminent. If there is a house fire, you should not even spend the 5 seconds it takes to grab the bag from the closet (let alone the 30 or more it could easily take if you have to rummage around for it). Every spare second should be spent getting yourself or others out of the building.
Yeah, it’s so much better to have your stuff spread around the house so you won’t be tempted to spend five seconds grabbing a bag when the house is on fire.
</sarcasm>
As I said, that point was more psychological. But people revert to their training under duress, and someone that obsesses over prepping their bag may well think (in a disaster scenario) that grabbing the bag is more important than getting out now. Not true for everyone, but surely true for some people. Five seconds may be literally a lifetime in a house fire.
The way I see it, there is a very narrow range of disaster types where a bag comes in handy. It’s not useful for immediate threats like a house fire. And it’s not needed for less immediate threats like storms. So far, the “15 minute tsunami” sounds like the best candidate where a bag might come in handy.
It wouldn’t. but I can’t conceive of a situation where I would need such things readily at hand. To me, the people I hear talking about their “bug out bags” are doing little more than fantasizing about some disaster hitting where only they will be prepared to survive out in the wilderness afterward. It’s one of those things which should be on stuffwhitepeoplelike.com if it isn’t already.
if my building is on fire, I’m grabbing exactly two things before I GTFO. 1) pants, if necessary, and 2) my external hard drive. #2 is the only thing holding shit I can’t replace.
Cloud backups, my friend. I have a lot of irreplaceable data, but none of it would be lost in a fire or other disaster. I absolutely do not want to be thinking about whether to grab my laptop or not in a fire situation. The only irreplaceable thing in my home is my cat.
Skip the pants, too. Your dignity is also replaceable.
I genuinely can’t think of a situation where I would use it, and storing and keeping things fresh is a pain.
I live on the fifth floor of a bunker-like concrete building in one of the most heavily fortified cities on earth, and tens of thousands of people (and shops, schools, hospitals, fire stations, etc.) are in my immediate neighborhood.
When would I use this? It would have to be an event where:
I must leave my home immediately with no warning
I cannot take shelter or receive supplies in any of the thousands of buildings around me
I can’t get five miles north to my in-laws in the suburbs
Everyone has decided to abandons DC, including key government personnel, and no relief will be available
It’s nothing to me, whether you make minimal preparations or not. I am not here to be an evangelist on the topic. For my part, a few minutes and a few dollars spent preparing a bag will have cost me very little if it never proves useful.