It's July again, which means it's worth spending twenty minutes on something you hope stays theoretical. We wrote a full checklist last summer in Getting Ready for Fire Season, and it all still holds. This is the short version, plus the parts most people skip.
The five-minute review
- Power for the network gear. A battery that can carry your router and radio through a few hours of outage is the difference between having internet and not. Check that it still holds a charge—batteries quietly die sitting on a shelf.
- Your phone's alerts. Confirm Wireless Emergency Alerts are on and that whatever county or agency app you rely on hasn't logged you out or gone unupdated.
- Documents you can reach offline. Insurance, IDs, prescriptions, photos of the house. Downloaded to the phone, not just sitting in the cloud, because the cloud needs a connection.
- A plan that doesn't need the internet. One out-of-area person everyone in the family checks in with, and a meeting place. Written on paper, in a wallet.
The part people skip
Test it. Unplug the router battery and see what actually stays up. Open the offline documents with the phone in airplane mode. Half the plans we hear about have never been run once, and a plan you've never tested is a guess.
We'll keep hardening our side of this—backup power, failover paths, the work we described in Redundancy. We'd also like to make it easier for our customers to get their hands on the kind of gear that keeps a house online when the power doesn't cooperate. More on that when there's something to say.
The takeaway: the checklist is short, and July is a better time to run it than August.