When describing how the River Fire devoured her home in August 2021, Lizz Porter broke down only once, after I asked her what she wished she had taken with her.
"This is the worst part," Porter, 47, said. "It was our first evacuation, so we were like, ‘there's no way our house is going to burn down.’"
She left her grandmother's paintings, the external hard drive with her son's baby pictures stored on it, her husband's family Bible that had four generations of baptisms and marriages written in it. Her wedding dress.
"We never thought that we would actually lose…" Porter's voice trailed off.
As firefighters battle to bring the blazes across Los Angeles under control, many of us, upon reading the accounts of survivors, may look around our homes and wonder what we would take with us in an emergency.
The recommendations from experts amount to a straightforward and pragmatic checklist: birth certificates, passports, and financial information. These items are for immediate survival and to provide the rebuilding blocks when the disaster passes and the days — and weeks — after it descends.
What's harder to choose and practically impossible to pack ahead of time in a go-bag are those possessions that are largely uninsurable, irreplaceable, and priceless.
Really, what you need to take with you depends on a host of factors. How much time you have, the nature of the disaster, your state of mind, the time of day, whether you have electricity, and whether you're home at the time. Even the best-laid preparations might not be enough.
I spoke with four people who had to evacuate their homes during a disaster, two of whom experienced a total loss. Here's what they took and didn't.
Lizz Porter sits among the remains of her home after the River Fire in August 2021. (Courtesy of Lizz Porter @lizz_porter)
The big regret
By many accounts, Porter and her family were well-equipped to handle an evacuation of their home in Colfax, Calif. Raised in California, she and her husband have always been prepared for an earthquake. The teardrop camper in their driveway served as a supped-up go-bag and roaming shelter in the event of an emergency.
"We grow up being taught to have an earthquake emergency plan, and so that was always our plan. We didn't make a lot of adjustments for fire," Porter, who designs home goods, said.
With an hour to evacuate, Porter and her family each packed a bag of clothes. She tucked a box of her childhood photos into the car, along with a bin of stuff from when her son was born. They also took their bin of important papers, which "actually turned out to be more than just papers and I'm eternally thankful to my disorganized self," she said.
But it's those other left-behind items she tries to not beat herself up about.
"I've been through enough in my life and I need to get as much as I can out of every day, so I try really hard not to have a bunch of regrets," she said. "But that's the big one."
Seven hours to think
Aparna Shewakramani had about seven hours to consider what in her house she wanted to save, as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey crept higher in her one-story home near Houston, and she and her mother, recovering from hip surgery, waited for rescue.
She stacked photos and personal memorabilia high on shelves and piled her clothes, shoes, and whatever else she could on top of her bed.
"You have to start assessing if the water reaches here, am I OK with this going?" Shewakramani, 40, said. "So your most precious things are as high as possible, and then it goes down in importance, which is a weird assessment to be making as your home is literally flooding."
Aparna Shewakramani's damaged belongings from Hurricane Harvey. (Photo courtesy of Aparna Shewakramani)
By her own admission, Shewakramani was ill-prepared for the hurricane. Someone at work gave her a case of bottled water the day before when he heard she had none stocked. As the water seeped into her home, Shewakramani finally packed a go bag. In it went birth certificates, Social Security cards, passports, medicine, dog food, two outfits, and pajamas. As the hours ticked by, she took pictures of her flooded home and filed claims with her insurer — she's an insurance lawyer by trade.
Official help never came to her house, but Barb on a kayak did. Barb — Shewakramani didn't get her last name and never found her post-hurricane — paddled Shewakramani, her mother, and her two dogs to higher ground at a local high school. Later, FEMA boats would take them to a road where Shewakramani's uncle waited to take them to his house.
"When the waters had receded, the water had come into about our knees," she said. "So everything below the knees was ruined."
For Shannah Game, she didn't have to worry too much about her home and everything in it. She had to worry about it becoming uninhabitable after Hurricane Helene pummeled her hometown of Asheville, N.C., in September 2024.
Game, 47, and her husband had prepped before the storm by filling the bathtub with water, gassing the car, and stocking up with flashlights and candles, but those preparations did little to help them in the aftermath. Though their basement flooded, they were largely spared the worst damage. But the area was without electricity for 10 days, without water for two weeks, and without clean water for a month and half.
"Now we were in a survival situation," said Game, a podcast host and money educator. "We had absolutely no idea the amount of devastation that would be caused."
Shannah Game. (Photo courtesy of Shannah Game)
They loaded water into buckets from a neighborhood creek to flush the toilet. Game's husband stood in a grocery store for six hours and by the time he got into the store, almost everything had been picked through. Stores would only take cash and the Games had just $8 on hand.
After eight days, Game and her husband packed up their dog, the bag with their important documents, and some clothes and left their home behind. They didn't return for another month.
"There was a huge amount of anxiety because you don't quite know what's going to happen," Game said. "Do we leave, do we stay? How long is this going to be? Is it even safe for us to be here?"
No chance at all
Marika Porter (no relation to Lizz Porter) had not one second to save anything in her home, including her two dogs and cats in 2009 when a wildfire rampaged through her neighborhood in Auburn, Calif.
She was at the movies with her husband and 4-year-old daughter and when they emerged from the theater, Porter saw a massive plume of black smoke coming from up the hill near where her house stood.
Her husband, who had met them at the theater on his motorcycle, raced up the road to save her pets, but he couldn't get close. The roads were closed off. On the phone, Porter begged him to get her animals.
Marika Porter and her daughter now, 16 years after the 49er Fire in 2009. (Photo courtesy of Marika Porter)
"He said, 'you don't understand,' and those words are so profound now. I didn't understand," Porter, a small business owner, recounted. "I had absolutely no idea of what was happening or what I would have to experience."
When her landlord called sobbing later — he had broken through the fire line — Porter knew the worst had happened. She sat in her van parked as close as she could to where her home once stood, doing her best to explain it to her daughter.
"This little girl climbs out of her booster seat, picks up the one toy that I hadn't cleaned out of the van that morning, and said, 'it's OK, Mommy, I have one toy,'" Porter, 57, said. "And I lost it."
While Shewakramani advises people to have a go-bag, she still doesn't have one of her own despite her experience. Game, on the other hand, dedicated a closet for disaster preparedness. It includes all the items she wished they had before: solar phone chargers, bottled water, non-perishable food, a camping stove, a gas jug, a fire extinguisher, and a lot more cash.
Marika Porter also has a go-bag, but now she stores it in her car. A few years ago, when a neighbor pounded on the door saying they needed to evacuate because of another fire, "the go bags that had been so carefully packed, we didn't even grab," she said. "Our only thought was get the animals, get out the door."
Porter, who also formed an online support group for wildfire survivors, also recommends "as inconvenient as it is" to store important papers in a safe deposit box off-site. Fire-rated safes often can't survive the heat of wildfire and everything in them would be lost.
Lizz Porter thinks everyone should make a priority checklist now before any catastrophe strikes. Beyond the pragmatic, the checklist should include those sentimental items you wouldn't want to lose and where they're located. It should be stashed on top of your go-bag.
But for Porter, that thought exercise she recommends is now moot.
"The irony of it is that the things I have now have so little actual sentimental value that I don't… care if I lose it," she said, "because I've already lost all of the things that really mattered."
Janna Herron is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X @JannaHerron.
