What outdoor experience can contribute to a household emergency, and where confidence must give way to responsibility.
There is a kind of calm that helps us get the work done. There is another that amounts to sitting comfortably while the time to act slips away. A hurricane does not care which one we believe we possess.
When I first wrote about a hurricane survival plan in 2011, I gave calm and outdoor equipment too much credit. I suggested that outdoor people were better suited to emergencies and that calm was the thing that would keep us alive. Those claims were too broad. I withdraw them.
Experience can help us prepare. Calm can help us think. Neither replaces a suitable shelter, safe water, medical planning, or leaving when officials direct us to leave.
For practical preparation: Use the consolidated Florida Hurricane Preparedness: Home, Travel, and Knowing When to Leave. This page is its reflective companion, rather than another supply checklist. Follow current local emergency instructions.
The useful part of outdoor experience
Camping teaches us to think about ordinary necessities. Where will we sleep? What will we drink? How will we feed the people with us? What happens when the weather changes? Those questions are useful at home, too.
But a household is not simply a campsite with the electricity turned off. People may need medicines, medical equipment, transportation, accessible shelter, or help caring for children and pets. A collection of expedition gear cannot answer those needs by itself.
The useful habit is looking carefully at the people and circumstances before choosing the equipment. We should be practiced enough to recognize a gap, rather than so pleased with our supplies that we overlook it.
Calm should leave evidence
I would rather measure preparedness by what has been arranged than by how relaxed someone appears. Does the household know the plan? Is there a destination if leaving becomes necessary? Has someone considered the person who needs help getting there?
The Florida Division of Emergency Management directs residents to know their evacuation zone and their home’s ability to withstand severe weather, prepare for individual needs, and use county emergency information. These are concrete tasks. Feeling comfortable is not a substitute for completing them.
The National Weather Service says to follow local instructions and leave immediately if ordered. An evacuation order is not an invitation to demonstrate how well we can camp in the living room.
Leaving can involve expense, inconvenience, and uncertainty. Those difficulties deserve planning and assistance. They do not disappear because someone tells a worried family to stay calm.
The judgment in “not today”
In my original account, I described occasions when Sean and I considered the current, tide, wind, and surf, looked at one another, and decided not to paddle. That is the part worth carrying forward.
The decision did not require a dramatic rescue or an impressive story afterward. It required accepting that an outing could wait. Whatever our experience, the consequences of a poor choice would reach beyond the two of us.
I do not offer that memory as permission to seek hurricane surf or disregard marine warnings. The lesson is restraint. Skills are useful partly because they help us recognize when using them would be an unnecessary gamble with other people’s safety.
A household plan has room for neighbors
Self reliance has value. So does knowing when to ask for help and arranging what help we can responsibly give. The neighbor who needs a ride does not become less important because our own vehicle is packed.
These conversations belong before conditions become dangerous. An offer is more useful when it names what we can actually do. Good intentions need time, transport, and a workable plan. They also need limits. Helping someone should not mean improvising a hazardous rescue that we are not equipped to perform.
The ordinary things worth protecting
My old list included toys, books, and games. I still think they belong in the conversation. Once immediate safety and essential needs are addressed, familiar things can give a household something to do besides wait.
Food matters for the same reason. A meal provides nourishment, but preparing for it is also a way of saying that the people gathered with us have been considered. The menu may be modest. The care need not be.
I am interested in the old habits of keeping a useful pantry, knowing our tools, sharing work, and making room at the table. Those habits deserve preservation when they serve the people living now. They deserve revision when better knowledge shows their limits.
That is the calm I want to cultivate: enough attention to prepare, enough humility to listen, and enough resolve to leave a familiar place when staying is no longer the responsible choice.
Jeffrey John Fabiszewski
Current planning resources
The practical guidance remains in the consolidated FloridaOATS hurricane guide. Consult Florida emergency planning resources, your county emergency management office, and National Weather Service hurricane action guidance for current instructions. Primary resources reviewed October 25, 2026. This essay grows from the earlier hurricane article; its old equipment list and safety claims should not be used as current guidance.
Put the reflection to work
Use the current household guide for seven day quantities, safe water, sanitation, heat, evacuation, and lessons from COVID. Keep the home reserve separate from the bag you carry to a safe destination. Practice the plan and follow current county instructions.
Keep learning: the Florida preparedness reading guide
Start with the household plan, then work through the practical skills. These companion articles connect FloridaOATS and Liquid Rhythm Kayaking.
- Household planning, evacuation, sanitation, and lessons from COVID
- Seven day quantities and a practical household equipment check
- Packing for evacuation and vehicle travel
- First aid supplies, prescriptions, and household illness
- Weather information, lighting, and backup power
- Safe meals when the lights go out
- A seven day pantry menu and food storage
- First aid when help is delayed
- Assessing hazards after the storm
- The limits of flame lanterns
- Using the MSR Dragonfly safely
- Fire blankets, extinguishers, and escape
- The original Hurricane Calm plan, revised
- The FloridaOATS hurricane archive introduction
