By Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief & Paramedic | Behind The Alarm
Share this one — especially the first item.
There is one action on this list that does almost nothing for your own house and a great deal for everyone else on your road. It costs nothing, it takes thirty seconds, and almost nobody knows to do it. If you pass along one thing from this entire series, make it that.
The full series lives here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13b6nts3fL4YzD_iZ7pStepU1lPzea9fH?usp=drive_link
The order came. You are leaving.
This article is not about whether to go, when to go, or how to read an alert level. Those decisions belong to your sheriff and your emergency management office, and when they tell you to go, you go. This is about the five minutes between the decision and the driveway.
Most of what follows takes seconds. None of it will save your house by itself. What it does is buy the crews working your street the ability to do their job — and in the case of the first item, protect every other house on the block.
Two of these depend on work you do before the day arrives. Find your water shutoff and your gas meter now, in daylight, with a wrench in your hand. Not in the dark with embers coming down. A tagged valve and a meter key cost almost nothing, which puts them squarely in the budget logic we covered in Part 6.
1. Shut the water off. This is the one nobody thinks of.
Start with why, because this is the item people skip when they do not understand it.
When a house burns, the plumbing inside it fails. Supply lines soften, fittings let go, and every one of those failures becomes an open outlet on the municipal water system — an uncontrolled, unmetered drain that runs until somebody closes a valve. Nobody is coming to close it. The house is on fire.
One house doing that is a rounding error. Now multiply it. A block of burning structures, then a subdivision, all bleeding water out of the same distribution system that engine companies are drawing from at the same time.
This is not theory. In its own preliminary report on the Palisades Fire, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power listed damaged and open premises piping in burned structures among the causes of the pressure collapse that left hydrants dry — alongside firefighting demand and residents leaving hoses and sprinklers running as they evacuated. The department’s chief engineer put it plainly: once a house burned, its service connection acted like an open leak, and with enough of those points of escape, sending more water into the system could not raise the pressure. California’s November 2025 water supply analysis describes the same mechanism in general terms — destroyed internal piping creates an open connection that drains the network. Researchers at UCLA later found the pattern is not unique to Palisades; in urban conflagrations, hydrant failure looks closer to the rule than the exception.
I want to be fair about the whole picture. Structure leakage was one of several compounding draws that day, and it was not the largest. All three of the local million-gallon tanks temporarily went dry, with demand running at four times normal for fifteen straight hours — an impossible refill rate. But of everything on that list, the leaking structures are the only part a homeowner can do anything about.
Your closed valve does not save your house. It keeps water in the system for the crew trying to save your neighbor’s.
How to do it
• Close the main shutoff where the water line enters the house — usually in the basement, crawlspace, or a utility closet on the street-facing wall. If that is all you can do, do it.
• Better: close the curb stop at the meter, out by the street. That isolates the service line itself, not just the house side. It takes a meter key, which is inexpensive and worth keeping in the go-bag.
• Know where both of these are before fire season. Tag them. Show your spouse and your kids, because the person leaving may not be you.
One important exception
If you are staying to defend the property, or if there is any chance firefighters will need interior water at your house, leave it on. This is guidance for people who are leaving.
2. Close every door and window — including the interior ones.
Exterior closures keep embers out. Interior doors are the part people miss. If embers do get in and something ignites, closed interior doors slow the spread and hold the fire to one room long enough to matter. It also gives crews making entry a compartmentalized building instead of one open volume.
Leave them unlocked if you can. A locked door is a forced door, and forcing takes time we may not have.
3. Disconnect the garage door from the opener.
No power means no door, and the garage is frequently where a crew wants access — it is often the least protected opening on the structure. Pull the manual release cord so the door can be lifted by hand.
Practice it once now so you are not reading a label by flashlight with smoke coming over the ridge.
4. Turn the lights on, inside and out.
Smoke can drop visibility on a residential street to almost nothing in the middle of the day. Lit windows tell an engine crew where the structure is, where its edges are, and that it is worth working. Porch light, interior lights, whatever you have. It costs you nothing on the way out.
5. Put a ladder at an accessible corner.
A ladder leaned against the house at a corner gives roof access without a crew hunting for a way up or pulling one off the rig. It is a small courtesy that saves real minutes when minutes are the whole game.
6. Consider shutting the gas off at the meter.
This one is a judgment call, and I will be straight about the tradeoff. Shutting gas off at the meter removes a fuel source at the structure. It also means you cannot turn it back on yourself — restoration requires the utility, and after a major incident that can take days or weeks even if your house never burned.
Some jurisdictions would rather homeowners leave it alone so utility crews can shut systems down in an orderly way. Ask your local fire department or your gas utility what they want before fire season, then follow that answer. If you do shut it off, you need a wrench at the meter — keep one there, tied to the pipe.
7. Move the combustibles away from the structure.
Thirty seconds of work with real payoff. Doormats. Patio cushions. The trash can leaning against the siding. Firewood on the porch. Propane cylinders from the grill. Every one of those is an ember catcher sitting against your wall.
Move them out into the open, away from the house and away from the deck. If Part 6 got you to clear the first five feet already, this is just the last few things you carried back out there since.
8. Stage the vehicle nose-out, windows up, keys with you.
Back into the driveway before you start any of the rest of this. Windows and vents closed so the interior does not fill with smoke while you work. Headlights on.
Keys in your pocket, not on the hook by the door. People have gone back inside for keys and not come out.
If you have sixty seconds instead of five minutes
Water off. Doors closed and unlocked. Get in the truck and go.
Everything else on this list is worth doing. Nothing on this list is worth dying for, and no house on this road is worth your life or the life of the person who would have to come looking for you.
The point of all of it
Seven of these eight items are about your house and the crew that may come to it. The first one is not.
Shutting your water off is the only thing on this list that changes the odds for people you may never meet. And it only works if enough of your neighbors do it too — one closed valve on a burning block is a rounding error, and fifty closed valves is a hydrant that still has pressure when the engine pulls up.
So tell them. “Shut your water off when you leave” is one sentence; it is free, and on a bad day it is the difference between a hydrant that flows and one that does not.
Tell the folks on your road. Tell your homeowners association. Tell whoever runs your neighborhood page. Bring it to your township meeting. This is the rare piece of preparedness advice that gets stronger the more people hear it.
Find your valve this week. That is the assignment.
A note on the series. When I started this, seven parts looked like enough. It was not. Readers kept raising things that deserved their own treatment, and a subject this important is worth adapting to rather than forcing into an outline I drew up in advance. This article exists because of a question a reader asked.
Next in the series — Part 8: Recovery Starts Before the Fire. Why the prepared household is back on its feet months ahead of the one that was not, and how everything in Parts 1 through 7 pays off after the smoke clears.
About the author. Fred R. LaPoint is Fire Chief of Stronach Township Fire Department in Manistee County, Michigan, and a licensed paramedic with over 50 years in emergency services. He is a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and an active Team Rubicon disaster responder with more than three dozen domestic and international deployments.
Sources for this article. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Palisades Fire preliminary report, July 2025. California Natural Resources Agency, water supply memorandum, November 20, 2025. UCLA water resources policy analysis on urban conflagration hydrant performance, 2025.
Before the Order Comes is an eight-part preparedness series from Behind The Alarm.
This piece reflects general fire service perspective and is not a substitute for guidance from your local fire department or emergency management office. Utility shutoff procedures, evacuation protocols, and local ordinances vary by jurisdiction — check with your own department and utility before fire season.
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 22, 2026. Read the original.