@aeroworksxp You mixed up your abbreviations. I'm in DFW. Dallas Fort Worth. I think it's already gone to shit in Detroit.

I'd hate to be in San Franciscograd and have to fleet.  Bay Bridge will be jammed.  Ditto with Golden Gate Bridge.  Ditto for the major roads south to San Mateo and Santa Clara County.  No boat, no go.

HA. I always do that. Don't know why.

In Virginia where the house is, there are few egress routes and a whole lot of people. They've got the main interstate set up to where they can make it outbound only with a series of gates on the ramps. But, even with that, if the whole area got told to evacuate RFN, there would be pandemonium and no one would be able to leave because of the number of accidents would block all the egress routes. Wife and I already have a plan to bug out well before any kind of evac order in the case of a hurricane bearing down. The naval base getting nuked, well, we're toast. Or perhaps ash, not sure.

I recall a few years ago there was an un-predicted ice storm. A lot of businesses, schools, etc. told everybody to leave at about the same time shortly after it got started and it was sticking to the roads. There were something like 400 accidents. It took me almost 3 hours to get home, an hour of that was just leaving the place where I worked. It's normally about a 25 minute drive.

It's just over 200 miles to my family's hunting cabin. That's 10 days of heavy walking with my 8 month old strapped to my chest.

Closer to home I have a few places within a days walk that are in the middle of a 5k acrea area.

The 10 day walk would suck but it will be physically easier than the long trail I've done twice but the kid will be difficult to keep quiet.

In the next year or 2 we'll be moving out of state. Fortunately I'm a psych rn that works heavily in detox as well. WV, TN, etc will be great for me finding work with cheap land. Pretty much all the low income meth, opioid hotspots are a calling.

...or fire, insert other natural disasters.

Yup. After visiting family in WV...i started looking. Family works for the gov. Me not so much. My job field..has very little going for it. All look to pay sub 30k a year. Fuck that.
Medical or outside sales seem to be big. Cable TV installers as well...40k+ to start...thats insane.

This is one of the reasons we already live at our BOL. My wife would prefer to live in a city but I was single when I bought the house we live in now.
The place is not very remote but it's away from all the major roads and freeways and of course it's outside of the city limits. We have our own water and septic.
Hopefully nothing serious happens that will force us to bug out but my plan B is to hook up our travel trailer and head to an alternative BOL, 50 miles from here.
I also keep a Kawasaki KLR-650, dual sport motorcycle. It gets 55 MPG and has a 6 gallon fuel tank thus providing a 300 mile range on a tank of gas.  Obviously it's too small for hauling much but it's a great SHTF transportation. I can ride it just about anywhere. Say something happens and my wife gets stuck at work, 30 miles away and all roads are blocked with traffic. I can use the bike to go get her. It can be ridden on shoulders, between cars, alongside a railroad etc. You get the idea. Also it can be my daily transportation if gasoline gets extremely expensive or hard to get (been there, done that and got a t-shirt).
In extreme WROL SHTF case, If we can no longer stay at home but all roads are blocked with dead bodies and "hordes of zombies" are heading our way, my last resort would be to head to a closest small airport and requisition one of the rental single engine planes and use it to get the heck out of the area.

One day you may be forced to "bug out" -house fire, flooding, wind damage that makes your house unsafe to occupy, etc. You should be prepared for at least that.

Also, I agree "bugging out" may put you into greater danger but don't fall into the trap of believing your house is a fortress either. It is not. I read a lot of posts from people who talk about having range cards for their neighborhood or identified fields of fire to engage bad guys from their windows. Honestly, if it ever gets that bad and you are still inside your home, you have already lost. A stationary defense is always a losing strategy. It is just a matter of how long you have.

So, a "bug out" plan and PREPARATIONS give you another option. It may not be the option you would choose but it may become the only option you have left.

I thought about that, but it is not viable for moving a wife, a 3 year old, and a 3 month old baby...

I am prepared for this situation. This is a mostly go hide in a motel somewhere while you wait for insurance and shit to figure it out. that's easier. I'm talking about heading out of town for an evacuation or similar.

There are better body armor options than out there, my man.

Been thru this with the family, and now on my own in a different AO.  Up.north, we lived in an area where bug in was the appropriate response for most scenarios.  Bugging out was highly unlikely. I had plans and equipment in place.  An older small but comfortable travel trailer and a big 4x4 truck would take us almost anywhere with most of the comforts.
Now l live in hurricane country and made it thru a sideswipe by both Michael and Ivan.  Just needed the generator and fuel for about three days.  Last year i volunteered twice working disaster relief after Michael tore up the panhandle, and if its a Cat 3, its load up the bike, hook up the trailer and away l go.  
I realize that Florida and to a lesser extent, the Southeast US is vulnerable to hurricanes and the only response to a big one is to run.  Other than that one instance. I am still bugging in.  Gridlock was everywhere on both 75 and 95, but the back roads were wide open..  as always. Scenario dependent..

Way, way too many variables here.

What kinds of events would make you bug out?

That's your first question.

All of your other planning will derive from the answer.

True but living and working in or at or around your bug out location is still most desirable because you mitigate combinations of worst case scenarios down to single incidents. I live and work from my bug out location and because of that severe weather, geological events and house fire are the only things I really have to worry about. Two-ish are unlikely but not impossible. Summer heat and winter cold can be a bitch in the high desert but aren’t insurmountable.  Mass exodus from a metro area combined with those things could be.

This is my thinking. Need to come up with a list of disasters that can happen in you area

Ohio, We will never have a hurricane or a flood that is large enough to cause massive problems. Tornado, that's typically a local event.

The ones I can think of here are mainly Bug in type scenarios.

Power Outage, long term and and the better part of a large city being without.  Especially in the Winter.

Flu or some virus/contagious disease that becomes like a Spanish Flu type outbreak

General breakdown in law and order due to large riots that disrupt food etc from coming into the city.

Gasoline outage or severe cutbacks in gas coming in.

When I lived in Florida I noticed the same thing. Nobody used the back roads.

Someone pointed out how Waze and other mapping apps would route people to the side roads.  This assumes the cellular network isn’t totally overloaded and allows people to even get the data, and their smart phones still have a charge.  Mapping apps use a ton of data and usually drain batteries fast (betcha at least a few people forget their charging cable for the car).  So not really compatible with a SHTF environment.

Even as recently as a couple of years ago I have been in situations where the back roads were mostly clear while the main arteries were clogged for hours.  Thus I keep up to date paper maps in the car.

Well, it worked perfectly for me getting out of S. Florida when a hurricane was inbound.

when the truck comes and the soldiers say you are going to the fema camp you are bugging out and should have a bag ready for that.

this can and does happen.

it can happen to you.

dont believe me?  chernobyl.

this use case sucks also because those traffic lines etc are exactly why you wouldnt want to try and self extract by car -not the place to be in fallout.  later your only choice will be fema.  imho it makes the case for a BOB separate perhaps from the case for bug out supplies for a hurricane or other weather event.

One of the unfortunate side effects of relative prosperity in the western society in which we live is that large portions of the populations are conveniently spared the realities that much of the world has to deal with on the regular, and all it takes is one or two generations who don't know what it feels like to truly want to take that for granted, even if unintentionally.   For a lot of the country (especially parts who do not experience regular natural disasters) It's very easy to slip into the mindset that the Government (be it local, state, or federal)  will save you and take care of you if anything were to happen and that there is no individual responsibility or need to take your wellbeing into your own hands -- and frankly half our population has that mindset.

It's a cultural thing.  It doesn't have to be that way, but it takes vigilance to remind each generation that it wasn't so long ago the world was very different.   To a certain degree all generations will have to experience and learn it themselves, but it's natural to want to spare the next generation the struggles our forefathers had to go through.  I was 8 when the cold war ended, too young to really understand how scary it was for my parents, and the 90's doesn't really seem all that long ago.

Still, some of us do our best not to forget how easily stability can slip into chaos (what's the old saying?  Society is just nine missed meals away from anarchy, or something along those lines?) and it doesn't take much -- just a mindset that you're not owed anything, and are at least partially responsible for your own well being.  Something that, IMO, will serve a person well not just emergency preparedness but in a lot of aspects of their lives.

Just the little things.... imagine how much easier an evacuation would be if people kept their gas tanks topped off just as a matter of course.  Invested in a generator, had a bag packed, or had enough money stashed away for a few nights at a hotel.  Even that would put them above the average person...

We really need to raise the average...

Main roads are the enemy also vehicles that have under a 350mile range on a full tank are out of the question for me. My fully loaded F150 has a range of about 475 miles.

Remember the mass population is relying of google maps and Siri to show them the way, so act accordingly.

Absolutely.

Great post that takes the 'bigger picture' in view.

I think that a lot of people confuse bugging out with an evacuation.
To me, bugging out, is more of a SHTF, out of the blue occurrence. evacuation what happens in the face of wildfire, hurricane, flooding, etc...

Level IIIA.
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When we were younger, bugging out was certainly an option, and maybe still now. I think as we get up in age, staying home with decent supplies is much more reasonable. Short of a major fire we can probably do better here. Even with a tornado the basement is a damn fortress.

Nah, just 12 hours before the masses. BTDT a few times. There's usually a steady migration a couple days ahead, then it goes nuts 12-24 hours before the expected event. Leave before that and you're fine. For Katrina I took a local highway to family outside BR the day before that picture was shot. No sweat. The following day? Not so much. It was funny. I got there, dropped off stuff and headed to the walmart. It was busy but not bad. Two and a half days later we tried to go again to get some stuff for a LEO friend who was being sent into NO area and it was insane.

Katrina was the eye opener for me. I'd always been prepared with the basics, but I'd never really internalized the scope and time frame and how everything just goes to shit at once. Now I make the decision much earlier and just go with it. If it turns out to have been unnecessary I call it good training.

Yikes.

Suburbs will be a nightmare if things break down.

I “bugged out” for hurricane Irma. There’s ONE road out of the Keys and it was almost empty when I was headed out. I packed as much of our belongings in a truck and drove from the Keys to Alabama. I75 from Tampa to Tallahassee was PACKED. Feels nice having hundreds and hundreds of miles of range, and extra gas cans when there’s mile long lines at the gas pump. I drove 80mph in the shoulder when all the other lanes were bumper to bumper.

Boat? LEAVE IT. You’ll get shit gas mileage towing it, you’ll never find parking at a hotel. I tied my trailer chains to a 600 pound concrete block and anchored it in place. It survived just fine. If it didn’t? Insurance claim. Oh well.

Would have been nice to have a trailer full of supplies to bring back with me. I have a lot of lessons to implement for next time.

Water cistern: my neighbor was pressure washing the salt/surge grime WAY before city water was restored.

Food: neighbor just loaded his chest freezer in his truck bed and ran it off an inverter, I was stuck dealing with ice in a cooler.

Comms: cell service went out in the entire southern half of FL. Command wanted Group texts to keep tabs. Group texts stopped sending for almost a month. Walkie talkies still worked. This was my motivation for getting in to Ham.

Power: everything left behind was under 5 feet of water. Bring a working gen WITH you, or build an elevated battery backup/inverter system. I have a large shelf about 10 feet high in my garage that I will be installing one on.

AC: you don’t need to run your central air (240v) if you can camp out in a room with a window unit AC. If you have a solar panel, You can charge your batteries during the day and run your AC to sleep.

There will be looters, and a curfew.

Agree with this. I will say, though, that each time I have had to do it, it has been very brief. Two years ago we got hit hard enough to where power was out for a couple weeks. And for about one week, the flooding was too much for me to drive through (since remedied with a new Ranger). We try to be ready to bug in as well as we can, but we have things ready to go if we have to leave. Like I said, it is inherently brief, but it is bugging out.

I will only “bug out” if I have no other choice. We have everything we need here at home. If we pack up and go somewhere it’s because of water contamination and/or lack of sustainable food resources.

I can’t see how setting out on foot or in a vehicle would be better than just sticking it out right here.

You come to a spot where you run out of grass.

Never say never, we live in weird times

I live in rural north Florida but within a few minutes of interstate exits.

When the last round of hurricanes happened, we could indeed tell that South Florida people fleeing the storms were using apps to find their way around. Because they were ending up all over our small towns bleeding our gas dry. Where in times past they never would have know how to get to X gas station in Y hole-in-the-wall village or that any such places even existed.

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at my age and with my health issues,  bugging out is pretty much off the table.  I have shifted my priorities to other issues.

I have bugged out before

so not sure NEVER applies

That's a good, experienced-based checklist.  Thanks.

you can only make the decision to leave early if you know it is comming.

Doable for hurricanes, maybe some wild fires, but just about everything else you will find out about it after it happens. Being able to leave ASAP instead of hours later may make the difference between being far away and sitting in grid lock getting radiated or in the middle of a riot.

I live in an area where I could bug out

You already gave up living in a city

The big difference between a hurricane evacuation and you deciding on your own to GTFO is that a hurricane evacuation generally has the authorities telling everyone it's time to go.

That doesn't mean they do, but it's a bit apples to oranges.