Fred R. LaPoint | Fire Chief Paramedic, Stronach Township Fire Department
BEFORE THE ORDER COMES — PART 2 OF 8
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The full series is collected in one folder you can download, print, or pass along:
Before the Order Comes — series folder
Send it to somebody who lives alone. Send it to somebody with kids. Send it to the person you’d worry about first.
In Part 1, I made one argument: on the worst day of your life, you are not going to think clearly, so the goal is to have fewer decisions to make, not more supplies to carry.
The go-bag is where that argument becomes physical. It is a decision you made on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a closet, waiting.
Let me be blunt about what this is and isn’t. A go-bag is not a survival kit. You are not bugging out into the woods to live off the land. You are driving to a shelter, a motel, or your sister’s house in the next county, and you are going to be there somewhere between three days and three weeks. Pack for that. The gear-catalog version of this — the tactical pack with the fire steel and the water filtration straw — has very little to do with what actually happens to displaced families in Michigan or elsewhere.
Start with the bag itself
Use what you have. A backpack, a duffel, an old suitcase with wheels. Do not spend money on a bag before you’ve spent it on what goes inside.
Two things matter. First, one person has to be able to carry it while also managing a child, a pet carrier, or a family member who needs help. If you can’t pick it up and walk to the road with it, it’s too heavy. Second, wheels are worth more than most people think, right up until the moment you’re crossing a gravel driveway in the dark. A backpack is the safer default.
One bag per person for clothing and personal items. One shared bag for the household supplies. Kids old enough to walk are old enough to carry their own small pack — and giving a child a job during an evacuation is worth as much for their state of mind as it is for your load.
Medications: this is the one that hurts people
I said in Part 1 that prescriptions are the most commonly forgotten critical item. It’s worth understanding why, because the reason tells you how to fix it.
Medications aren’t forgotten because people don’t value them. They’re forgotten because they live in the bathroom, they get taken daily, and daily habits are invisible. You don’t think about your blood pressure pill any more than you think about your toothbrush. And under stress, invisible things stay invisible.
So make it visible:
• Keep a written list — drug name, dose, frequency, prescribing doctor, and pharmacy — in the go-bag and photograph it on your phone. If you end up in an emergency room in another county, that list is the difference between continuity of care and starting over.
• Ask your pharmacist about keeping a small buffer supply. Many insurers permit an early refill, and some states have emergency provisions during declared disasters. Ask before you need it; the answer varies by plan and by medication.
• Anything refrigerated — insulin especially — needs a plan of its own. A small insulated pouch and a couple of frozen gel packs in the freezer, ready to grab, handles the drive.
• Put a bright note on the go-bag itself that says MEDS FROM BATHROOM. It looks silly hanging in a closet. It will not look silly at 2 a.m.
Same logic for eyeglasses. An old prescription pair in the bag beats no glasses at all, and people who wear contacts should assume they’ll have no clean way to handle them for several days.
Water and food, without overdoing it
The standard guidance is one gallon of water per person per day. That’s sound for sheltering in place. For a bag you’re carrying to a vehicle, it’s unrealistic — a gallon weighs a bit over eight pounds.
Split it. A few bottles in the bag, a case in the vehicle. The vehicle is doing the heavy lifting here, and that’s the correct division of labor for almost everything in this piece.
Food should be the kind that needs nothing done to it. Protein bars, nuts, jerky, peanut butter, crackers, dried fruit. No cooking, no can opener, no water to reconstitute. Three days is plenty. You are going somewhere that has food; this is for the road and the first night before anything is organized.
If anyone in the household has a food allergy, celiac disease, or a medical dietary requirement, pack more than you think. Shelter food is what it is, and it is not built around your restrictions.
The stuff people forget
Everyone remembers clothes and a flashlight. Here’s what gets left behind, in rough order of how much regret it causes:
• Chargers and a power bank. Your phone is your navigation, your alerting system, your family communication, and your document storage. A charged phone with no cable is a brick by day two. Buy a cheap power bank and a spare cable that live in the bag permanently — not the one you use nightly, because that one will be plugged in at the wall when you leave.
• Cash in small bills. When the power’s out, card readers and ATMs are out with it. A hundred dollars in fives, tens, and twenties has bought a lot of gas and motel rooms over the years. Nobody at a rural gas station is making change for a hundred-dollar bill during an outage.
• A physical map of your county and the ones around it. Cell service fails in exactly the areas and moments you’d most want navigation. A paper map costs a few dollars and needs no battery.
• A hand-crank or battery radio. When the towers are overloaded or down, broadcast radio still works, and that’s how emergency information reaches you.
• Comfort items for kids. A stuffed animal, a favorite blanket, a deck of cards. This is not sentimental filler — a child who is regulated is a child you can manage, and you will have a great deal else to manage.
• A change of shoes. People evacuate in whatever was on their feet, and sometimes that’s slippers.
• Basic first aid and a week of any over-the-counter items you rely on.
What to leave out
Weight is the enemy. Every pound you add is a pound you carry while doing three other things.
Skip the tools you’d only need if you were building a shelter. Skip the multi-day cooking setup. Skip anything you’ve never actually used — an evacuation is a bad time to learn a piece of equipment. Skip the bulk quantities; three days in the bag, more in the vehicle.
And be honest about the sentimental items. I’m not telling you to leave your grandmother’s photographs behind. I’m telling you that a box of them is heavy and fragile, and the better answer for most families is to have photographed or scanned them in advance — which is Part 3, and which is the highest-value hour in this entire series.
The vehicle bag — the one almost nobody has
Here’s a question worth sitting with. If this happens while you’re at work, and you cannot get back to your house, what do you have?
For most people, the answer is: whatever’s in their pockets.
Disasters do not wait for you to be home. Wildfire, flash flooding, chemical release, a road closure that puts your house on the wrong side of the line — plenty of scenarios separate you from your house with no warning at all.
So keep a scaled-down version in the trunk:
• A case of water and a box of shelf-stable food.
• A blanket, a jacket, work gloves, and sturdy boots — seasonally appropriate, swapped twice a year.
• A phone charger that works in the vehicle, and a power bank.
• A small first aid kit.
• Copies of your key documents (Part 3 covers exactly which).
• A few days of any critical medication, if your doctor and pharmacist can help you arrange it.
• Paper maps.
Keep the fuel tank above half. That single habit costs nothing and has decided more evacuations than any piece of equipment in this article. When everyone leaves at once, the stations run dry, and the ones still open have lines. Half a tank is enough to get out of the county; a quarter tank is a decision you don’t get to make.
Where it lives and how it stays useful
The bag goes somewhere you can reach in the dark without moving anything else. A front hall closet, a mudroom, the floor of the bedroom closet. Not the attic. Not the basement if you flood. Not behind the Christmas decorations.
Everyone in the household needs to know where it is — including the teenager who might be home alone, and any family member who stays with you regularly.
Then twice a year, tie it to something you already do. When you change the smoke alarm batteries, open the bag:
• Rotate the food and water past their dates.
• Swap the clothing for the season, and check that children’s clothes still fit — kids outgrow a go-bag faster than anything else in it.
• Refresh the medications and re-verify the list.
• Charge the power bank.
• Confirm the documents are current — policies renew, cards expire.
Fifteen minutes, twice a year. A bag you packed in 2019 and never opened is not preparedness. It’s a bag of expired granola and pants that don’t fit anybody.
If you do nothing else
Start with one bag and four things: medications and the written list, a phone charger and power bank, cash in small bills, and a change of clothes with real shoes.
That’s a Saturday afternoon and almost no money, and it puts you ahead of most households in this township.
The rest can be built up over a few months. Perfect is not the standard here. Present is the standard. A partial go-bag by the door beats a complete one you’re still planning.
The bottom line
A go-bag is not about the gear. It’s about converting decisions you can make calmly today into actions you can perform badly tomorrow and still be fine.
You will not rise to the occasion. You will fall to the level of your preparation. Everybody in this line of work has learned that the same way, and I’d rather you learn it from an article.
Next in the series: Part 3 — Your Paper Life. Documents, photographs, and the recovery file. This is the sleeper piece and the one I’d most want my own family to read, because it’s the difference between rebuilding in three weeks and proving you existed for seven months.
The full series is collected here as it publishes: Before the Order Comes — series folder — free to download, print, and share.
Every claim is sourced. Corrections with sources are welcome and will be published.
This article first appeared in Behind The Alarm, the newsletter of Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic of the Stronach Township Fire Department, on July 19, 2026. Read the original.