The Best Wildfire Preparedness Supplies and Strategies of 2025

Use multiple weather and alert services. Several resources can help you stay informed about red flag warnings and pending evacuations in your area. Alerts have been known to fail in some disaster scenarios, so we recommend having multiple ways to receive warnings. We’ve tested multiple NOAA weather radio options, which can serve as both a source of warnings and provide you with additional information if you are evacuating and lose electricity or cell service. If you have one, you can look up your local station here.

 You can also turn on Wireless Emergency Alerts in your smartphone settings, which include nationwide notices for large-scale emergencies.Your local emergency management office or first responders might offer their own alerting options, too—your municipality’s website should offer more information on how to opt-in, which might require downloading a specific app. FEMA and the American Red Cross have their own apps, as well, and many officials and residents alike in fire-prone areas utilize the free Watch Duty app. The app, which is largely volunteer-run, synthesizes official alerts and other fire information across a growing number of US states.

Make sure you’re familiar with the language officials in your area use to issue evacuation alerts—often, they’ll issue a “watch” or “warning” first to indicate that there is a potential threat to your area, while an “order” means it’s time to go. If you don’t feel safe but haven’t received an alert, don’t wait for a message to tell you to leave. Trust your gut, pay attention to your surroundings, and try to stay updated through official sources to figure out your next steps.

Prep a go bag. One of the defining features of a wildfire evacuation is the speed with which you need to leave when the order comes, so we cannot stress this enough: Have a go bag ready. If you feel overwhelmed about what to pack, think of what you’d bring on a weekend overnighter (a change of clothes, toiletries and medications, comfortable shoes, and pajamas, along with spare cash and a battery charger for your phone).

Be sure to pack separate bags for each member of your family, including pets. Hopefully you’ll be heading somewhere close, like to a relative’s or friend’s house, a hotel, or a shelter. But if you’re interested in prepping your bag for a larger emergency scenario, read “The Best Gear for Your Bug-Out Bag.” You can also try out our kit builder to start thinking through how to personalize our emergency preparedness recommendations for your living situation.

Know your evacuation route. Many areas under threat of wildfire are smaller, rural towns that rely heavily on tourism. On a busy summer weekend it’s possible there will be more people and cars in town than the highway infrastructure was intended to support. But whether you live in a small mountain town or in a city suburb close to wildland, it’s worth knowing both your primary evacuation route and a secondary option, in case there’s a lot of traffic or the street signs are obscured by emergency vehicles or smoke.

Have an off-line map. During past wildfires, cell towers have burned down and flat-out failed before evacuation orders were even issued. That means it could be impossible to pull up Google Maps to find a route out — unless you take the preventative step of downloading a map of your area before any outages. If not, you’ll need either an off-line GPS device or a paper map.

For analog navigation of urban areas and highways, we like Rand McNally’s EasyFinder maps, which are available for all US states and Canadian provinces, as well as for major cities across North America. Each map displays thorough information about streets, rural roads, highways, and interstates, as well as the locations of hospitals, police stations, schools, public buildings, and religious institutions, all of which can be vital rally points during a disaster.

Take a look at OpenStreetMap as part of your planning. You can view and print the site’s maps with a “humanitarian layer” that highlights emergency buildings and evacuation routes—an incredibly useful tool when you need to get away from danger or find help.

Talk to your kids. There’s no way to know whether you and your kids will be together when an evacuation begins, so book a family meeting to talk about what to do if you are apart. (The Red Cross has a great guide for talking about fire safety with children.) If the little ones carry cell phones, have everyone keep family phone numbers and the address of a meeting location written on paper and tucked away in a wallet or backpack.

Plan for your pets. Most shelters won’t take animals, so if that’s your only destination option during an evacuation, make sure to have an alternate plan in place for your pets. The ASPCA has comprehensive information on how to handle your pets in a disaster, and just a few minutes of preparation can make the difference between taking or leaving your beloved animal behind. Former guide author Eve O’Neill kept a tiny go bag with some extra food, hay, and litter for her pet rabbit.

Think about your medications. Most advice you’ll encounter, including recommendations from the Red Cross, will tell you to have at least a week’s worth of any necessary medications packed in your emergency bag. Sometimes that’s easy to do ahead of time, say, if you rely on a device like an asthma inhaler or EpiPen. But it might be difficult or expensive to procure an extra supply of other medications ahead of an emergency, especially if you take a controlled substance. The best advice we can give is to simply make sure you’ve discussed your specific medical needs with your doctor ahead of time, and to pack physical copies of your prescriptions.

For a deeper, more granular breakdown of all the different ways one can both prepare for and recover from a wildfire, the Truckee Fire Protection District’s Laura Brown recommends Readyforwildfire.org, a comprehensive site packed with videos and downloadable content.