Emergency Kit Documents

[Northmountain]

From the Northmoutain Blog

Your home has been destroyed or you've had to relocate to a distant location in a disaster. No problem. You family all has 96-hour kits with cash in them and your vehicle is full of fuel, (you know this because you never let it get below a half tank on the fuel gauge). You are going to be ok. Right?

Well, as the folks who were similarly prepared when they were hit by Katrinia found out, they were still in trouble. Not only from the intensity of the destruction and the duration of loss of living facilities and jobs, but also due to the separation of family members from each other.

Some family members were injured and taken to a medical facility - somewhere. Children were taken to safe housing - somewhere. Senior adults were stranded or taken to temporary housing - somewhere. Some did not survive and when their bodies were finally retrieved, they were taken - somewhere - and few had identification.


Unfortunately, the initial disaster was just the start of the grief in the lives of Katrina victims. As time passed after the initial days, families tried to find each other and gather at the same location. Young children were protected by security. They wouldn't be released to just anyone claiming to be their parents or legal guardian. You needed proof that they were your kids.

Frequently, the parent(s) were severely injured and couldn't search for their children. Even if the kids could tell rescuers their parents names, it was a very hard and long term process to match the families members with each other.

A family photo in the emergency kits with each person identified on the back would have helped everyone in the quest to find other family members.

Flash forward a few weeks or more.

Mom or Dad go to a bank hoping to withdraw money from their account. So do an army of thief's who are trying to rob every penny they can in the confusion created by the devastation.

"I'm sorry sir or ma'am. Your account shows that it you have withdrawn all your money -- or -- we need your account information and photo I.D." "We need to see a recent statement." - to prove you own the account, that you are who you say, etc. Without it, retrieving your money may be difficult to impossible.

"We need medical care. We have insurance." "Who is your insurance carrier? May I see your insurance card please?"


The family is together and safe but wants to get back to as much of a normal life as possible. Water has receded and even though the house is in ruins, it can be rebuilt. All you needed to do is call your insurance agent, just like they'd seen on television over and over.

"What is your policy number?" "I don't' know. My house was destroyed! You know me. I've paid premiums to your company for years." The insurance agent knows that they can't proceed without proper records and identification but telling the devastated policy holder is tough. "I'm sorry, but we can proceed until you can provide the information needed?


Then finally make it to your home to start retrieving the few possessions that have survived. A police officer or member of the military sees you and asks for proof that you own the property and that you aren't a looter. Just because your drivers license says you lived at this approximate address (there aren't and surviving address numbers anywhere) four years ago when you renewed it, that doesn't mean you still have any claim to the property. "I need to see a recent utility bill, lease, deed, etc., before you will be allowed to touch anything on this site."

When you go to the FEMA tent hoping to receive federal assistance to rebuild your life, if you don't have all of these documents, you don't have a chance of receiving help. In fact, local government will work against any effort you make to clear your property and rebuild. As far as they are concerned, you are a thief, a squatter, a bad person.

Every adult emergency kit should include a copy of important documents...

• Government issue photo ID
• Insurance card
• Special medical needs ID's and documents
• Copies of recent bank and financial statements
• Copies of account numbers from utility bills
• A copy of your insurance policies
• A copy of deeds, leases, etc.
• A copy of your will and living will ( you may die in an emergency )
• A copy of your notarized last wishes for burial including any burial insurance policy, burial plans, cemetery plot ownership.
• A recent photo of your family with each person identified on the back of it - in permanent ink
• Names and contact information of in-state and out-of-state contacts
• Employee card

Think through your own situation. If you had to prove who you are in every step of restoring your life and family, what documents would you need? You may be surprised if you make an thoughtful inventory.

Put the copies of your documents in a waterproof / water resistant case that you can easily open repeatedly over time when you replace the old copies with new copies.


Hide the documents in your emergency kit. Your life is in that bag. A thief would love to get their hands on it.

If you have an opportunity to talk to anyone who has been severely impacted by a disaster, ask them what they they would have in their documents kit now. The list may be a lot longer than the one listed here.

[AZ Prepper]

Very good and important advice. Thank you for the post!

[Angela]

Some things like insurance cards and wills are probably okay to be copies. I keep my originals of birth certificates, vehicle titles, etc. all together in a waterproof bag in an undisclosed location so they can be grabbed quickly as well. A copy of some items like a passport would not fly with authorities, they'd need to see the originals.

Another way to store copies of your documents is on those little USB thumb drives. They don't take up much space in a pack, the only real drawback is if you needed the information before you found a working computer.

Here's a long ol' list I got from a preparedness fair of recommended documents to have copies of/originals of (most of these I don't even have, so they aren't going in mine, but I guess as you get older you get more of this stuff):

Proof of Identification
*Driver's License
*Concealed weapons permit/s
*Birth Certificates
*Social Security Cards
*Passports
*Marriage License

Property Records
*Mortgage/Deed
*Rental agreement
*Video, photos, lists of inventory (my insurance guy said to make sure I am in the photos or video--better proof that it was actually my stuff I guess)
*Receipts for major purchases
*Payment record for major repairs
*Appraisals of jewelry, other valuables
*Titles to vehicles
*Cemetery lot information
*Firearm inventory/Serial Numbers

Insurance Policies
*Homeowners
*Health
*Life
*Disability
*Automobile

Medical Information
*Immunizations, other records
*Prescription information (drug, dosage)
*Health Insurance ID Cards
*Physicians names and phone numbers
*Living will
*History of illnesses, accidents, surgeries
*Power of Attorney for health care
*Dental records

Estate Planning
*Wills, trusts
*Power of attorney
*Funeral instructions
*Attorney's name and phone number

Financial Records
*Tax returns (2 years)
*Credit cards front and back
*Stocks, bonds, CD's, money market
*Recent bank statement

Other
*Personal address book
*Backup of important computer files
*Usernames and passwords for online accounts
*Key to safety deposit box
*Recent photograph
*List of where original documents are kept
*Extra set of car and house keys
*Map of area and phone numbers of places you could go in case of evacuation
*Numbers of gas and electric company
*Emergency numbers

[Northmountain]

Being LDS, there is one item we've left off our lists..

A copy of our genealogical records and documents.

I keep a 64-gig thumb drive in our packs and update it every quarter. The data on it represents tens of thousands of hours of work and even more money spent to collect the data. My database is very large and the data on it is very precious to our family.

I've posted most of the basic info to new FamilySearch and the work is done for my ancestral families, but nFS is still woefully inadequate in its ability to store the full dataset about folks in my database. The capability is coming but isn't won't be available for "a while", nor will the storage space / database capacity for images of all the associated documents be available for a while yet either.

In addition to my genealogy data and images, the 64-gig drive is big enough to hold a fairly good sample of our family photos too.

I have a second drive, imaginatively labeled 'photos', in our kits as well. It contains a full set of the digitized photos that we'd want to save if all hard copies were lost.

Both are nestled in cotton inside a small steel can hoping it will provide some protection from a possible EMP.

Lastly, a set of all the data and photos is regularly backed up off site in several locations, including the homes of our children who live out of the area.

[Nauvoo2002]

My father was living in a high rise for the elderly down in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana (a suburb of New Orleans) and -- like so many other oldsters living in the same apt complex -- refused to evacuate before Katrina hit. Frankly, unlike the young folks, these native New Orleanian oldsters had lived through many a hurricane, plus the depression and WW2, and they knew how to handle things both during the storm and even after it when the 17th Street Canal levee broke and some of the flood waters made their way into the old Metairie area where his group lived. The lack of power was no problem for these oldsters, nor was the lack of city provided water. They prepared well, and they could have made it for the long hall, IF they had been allowed to do so.

However, four days after the storm, FEMA came in and said they were going to close down the complex and move the remaining residents out -- whether they wanted to go or not.

And this they did. The next day, they were loaded onto a bus and brought to the Kenner International Airport where they would live on the hot tarmac for three whole days before they finally got seats on a military transport plane that flew them to an air force base in San Antonio, Texas.

Only after the old folks were moved to San Antonio was I finally allowed to come down to get my father and bring him to my home.

Fortunately, although you could not get a phone call through during the day time (because the phone banks were overloaded), you could get phone calls through if you tried enough times in the middle of the night.

So when my dad told me that they would be forced to leave the complex the next day and would be allowed to bring only one small bag of items with them, he was shocked when I stressed to him not to bother bringing clothes (other than a clean pair of underwear and an extra pair of socks), but instead to bring the most precious of his photos and the most important of his documents.

Specific documents I had him bring out of there included:

1., His birth certificate

2., His apartment lease (proof of address)

3, His Social Security benefits information for 2005 (proof of income)

4, His Louisiana driver's license (government issued photo ID, plus another proof of address)

5, His Louisiana Medicaid card and medicare card (medical insurance)

6, His military DD-214 (honorable discharge papers from the military -- you never know when that might be handy to have)

7, Whatever medical records (immunizations, etc) he might have around the house, including all prescription bottles that he'd used in the past year or two)

8, His doctor's name, address, and telephone number (though in this case, that was useless since even the docs evacuated)

9, His social security card

10, A easy to find list that had the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all of his kids (we're scattered all over the country)

11, My deceased mother's birth certificate and death certificate

12, Their marriage certificate

13, His credit card

14, Whatever cash he had on hand (which turned out to be a goodly amount, and in small bills too -- I told you, my Dad lived through the depression, WW2, and lots of hurricanes over the years. He knew the importance of a stash of emergency cash.)


All of the documents should be put in a gallon sized ziploc plastic bag, to protect it from the elements. And I told him not to let this information out of his hands, no matter what.

He thought I was nuts at first, because I stressed him bringing out papers and the most precious of photos instead of clothes, like everybody else carried out in their allotted bag.

But, as he would soon find out, here was no way to change clothes while living out on the tarmac at the airport, anyway, and when he finally got to the air base at San Antonio, they had plenty of clean, fresh clothes for the evacuees to wear anyway. Frankly, the first thing the evacuees (and their hosts) wanted anyway was to allow these folks showers and opportunity to put on clean clothes that they were more than happy to provide.

If you ever have to evacuate suddenly, you can always get some clean clothes from somewhere. If nothing else, you can buy some inexpensive used clothes at a thrift store or something.

But you are the only person who can provide the personal documents that will be needed to get disaster assistance, insurance reimbursement, or other types of assistance.

After he finally got up to my place, I took him to the Red Cross center that was processing Katrina evacuees, mainly because Dad was about out of his medicines and Red Cross is the easiest way for an evacuee without a prescription to get replacement meds. In the case of Katrina, it was such a huge event and so many people were forced to leave without proper prescription paperwork that a system was already in place to handle the problem. But normally the disaster is not so great that they have whole systems already in place to deal with this issue. If you can prove you are a bona fide disaster victim (this is where government ID comes in), then you can give the Red Cross your prescription bottles and they can arrange for filling the script even without a written prescription. (BTW, nowadays the large national chains like Walgreens or CVS keep that information on tap, but my father was one of the thousands who used a New Orleans pharmacy without any out of town stores.) My dad gave the Red Cross nurse his prescription bottles, and she arranged for his refills.

Then FEMA came up with that program to provide evacuees with $2000 per household to help reimburse them for evacuation expenses.

That was an unexpected development -- they have never done that before, nor have they done that since -- but you had to be able to prove you were a bona fide resident of the areas affected to get that help. His Red Cross caseworker gave us information on how to apply for that, and at about 2 am in the morning, I finally got through in behalf of my father.

Because he had brought all that documentation out with him -- instead of bringing clothes that could be easily replaced -- it was very easy for me to provide the FEMA lady with all the information she needed in just one phone call. Everything she needed to know was right there in that ziploc bag my father brought out with him.

My father got that $2000 check less than a week after I got off the phone with the FEMA phone interviewer.

He also had no difficulty at all getting his Social Security check transferred to my home, in great part because he had all of his social security paperwork with him when I took him to my local office.

In my father's case, he sold his home a few years earlier after my mother died and he got too old to take care of it.

But I still have a brother who lives in Metairie, LA too, and he did have to deal with insurance agents. He was smart enough to bring out a copy of his home owner's insurance, and also of his flood insurance policies, and it made his life a lot easier too. (They still cheated him, paying him pennies on the dollar for actual damages incurred, but that is another story.)


So yes, these posts concerning how important it is to gather up and keep your documents where you can get to them in times of disaster really are alot more important than folks realize.

[mirandamedico]

Great advice and somethings we do carry and got to know few more about it.