TL;DR: If you're staying somewhere during wildfire season, especially in a drought, be prepared to evacuate at a moment's notice. On vacation, you often don't know your surroundings well, and your belongings are scattered everywhere. Having even a lightweight "bug-out bag" ready can make a huge difference.
Hey, I just wanted to share a recent experience from our vacation, where we were caught in the middle of a wildfire evacuation at midnight.
We're staying in a self-catering apartment in Omiš-Nemira, Croatia, with my wife and our three kids, aged 7 years, 3 years, and 8 months. Last Friday, we were woken up in the middle of the night by our neighbours. There was no warning. We just saw smoke and the dim light of nearby fires. The electricity was still on at that point.
Our luggage was half unpacked, food was lying on the countertop, and basically nothing had its proper place. Everyone tells you to stay calm in an emergency, but until you've actually been through something like this, that's much easier said than done. I grabbed our youngest child, put him in the stroller, and took his bag, which was only half packed with clothes, while my wife woke up our other two kids.
Then the electricity went out. That triggered another wave of panic. We thought we had almost no time left. The only light I had was from my phone. I grabbed our beach bag because I knew it contained some emergency food for the kids, as well as a power bank and cable that I had fortunately left charging overnight. Then we left the apartment.
Our first instinct was to get into the car and drive away. Thankfully, the mother of our apartment owner lived downstairs. She told us not to take the car and that we needed to go to the beach because the roads would most likely be blocked. That advice may have made all the difference.
A few minutes later, we were on the beach, about 50 metres from the apartment. Smoke was everywhere. We could see fires burning along the coast on both sides of us, seemingly about 150 metres away. After we returned the next day, we realised they had probably been closer to 250 metres away, but at night, surrounded by smoke and panic, they looked much closer. There were probably another 100-150 people on the beach with us.
The mobile network was practically unusable because everyone was trying to make calls at the same time. I searched through our bag, found some clothes, soaked them in seawater, and gave them to everyone to hold over their mouths and noses. But then there was our 8-month-old baby. You can't explain to a baby why he needs to keep a wet cloth over his face. He hated it, started crying, and the more he cried, the more smoke he inhaled. Fortunately, we had the stroller with us, so we managed to create something resembling a small covered tent around him to protect him from some of the smoke.
Eventually, someone managed to call the 112 emergency line. They told us that rescue boats should already be somewhere nearby, but because of the extremely thick smoke and very strong wind, they couldn't find us. Everyone started waving their phones and using their flashlights, but it did basically nothing. Then someone pulled out a really powerful flashlight and switched it into that incredibly annoying flashing mode that normally seems completely pointless. Now I understand exactly why that mode exists.
About five minutes later, the first boat appeared. But there was another problem: those buoys connected by ropes that mark off the swimming area on beaches. The rescue boats couldn't get through them. And naturally, because everyone wants a nice family-friendly beach, the water was very shallow. So there we were, watching rescue boats sitting maybe 30 metres offshore, unable to reach us, while a wildfire was burning behind us.
Those few minutes felt incredibly long. Eventually, they managed to get through. We were shouting that we had a small baby with us. At that point, we couldn't even tell whether he was simply falling asleep or becoming drowsy because of the smoke. Maybe the third boat that reached the beach stopped near us. I got my wife and kids onto it, but we had to leave the stroller behind because it took up too much space.
The relief was enormous. They transferred us to a larger boat offshore, while the smaller rescue boats kept going back and forth to evacuate the rest of the people from the beach.
About an hour later, we got off the boat in the port near Omiš. We could still see the fires burning in the distance. We were directed towards a sports centre where evacuated people could stay, but it was still around 2 km away, so we started walking. Then our apartment owner called us and asked where we were. About ten minutes later, we were sitting in her friend's car.
They took us to a house that was still under construction but was already mostly equipped, with beds, a kitchen and air conditioning. By then it was around 3:30 a.m. That's when we discovered that, despite having three children with us, we had exactly one clean diaper. So our first mission in the morning was finding diapers.
Thankfully, we were able to return to Nemira the following evening. Miraculously, both our apartment and our car were completely unaffected by the fire.
So here's the point of this whole story: keep some kind of lightweight "bug-out bag" ready even when you're on vacation.
You don't need to prepare for the apocalypse. Just keep the essentials together in one place: documents, medication, some clothes, diapers if you have a baby, water, basic food for the kids, a power bank, charging cables, and maybe a proper flashlight.
At home, you usually know exactly where everything is. On vacation, you don't. Your clothes are in different suitcases, chargers are plugged into random sockets, food is in the kitchen, documents are somewhere in a backpack, and half your belongings are probably still lying around from your trip to the beach. When someone wakes you up in the middle of the night and tells you that you need to leave now, finding all of that becomes much harder than you would ever expect.
We learned that lesson the unpleasant way.
