The last five years have seen one record-breaking conflagration after another: In 2020, fires burned more acres than in any other year. The 2017 Tubbs Fire and the 2018 Woolsey and Camp fires—all in California—were the three costliest wildfires in US history. The Camp Fire was also the deadliest, resulting in more than 80 casualties and transforming a small mountain town into what The New York Times called “a zone at the limits of the American imagination.” As of this writing, nine active, uncontained fires have burned more than 600,000 acres across five states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
This guide to wildfire preparedness builds on the expertise of its original author, senior staff writer Eve O’Neill, who was forced to evacuate her California home in 2017 during the Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people. At the time, it was the deadliest blaze the state had ever seen. In the aftermath, she described metal mailboxes and car parts dotting the ground in mercury-like puddles. I write about emergency preparedness for Wirecutter, and was living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 2020, when smoke from various wildfires in the region blocked the sun and turned what I consider one of the most beautiful places in the world into what looked like a different planet altogether. Meteorologists warned us to be “on alert and ready to leave at a moment’s notice, with go-bags packed.”
To identify the most helpful items to have on hand should a wildfire threaten your home, we reviewed recommendations from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the American Red Cross, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. We spoke with fire professionals, including Jenn Helvey, a senior wildland firefighter in Nevada; Laura Brown, the public information and safety officer for the Truckee Fire Protection District in California; Chris Bruno, fire captain at the State of California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection; and Jessica Gardetto and Carrie Bilbao, public affairs specialists at the Bureau of Land Management’s National Interagency Fire Center. This list was also informed by interviews and research we conducted for our larger guides to the best emergency-preparedness supplies and the best gear for your bug-out bag.
