Bug-in planning

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, roughly 150,000–200,000 people stayed in the New Orleans area rather than evacuating. Many stayed by choice, believing their homes offered sufficient protection; others lacked transportation or money. Of those who died from drowning — 33% of Katrina's Louisiana death toll — most were found at home, trapped by rising floodwater they couldn't escape. The lesson is not that staying is always wrong. It is that "bug in" requires the same level of deliberate planning as evacuation — and a clear threshold for when to flip the decision.

When staying is the right call

Staying put is often the safer choice for events that are short to medium duration, don't threaten the structure itself, and don't require specialized outside resources. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s guidance notes that evacuation increases exposure risk when the hazard is widespread and movement routes pass through it.

Stay when:

• The threat is a short-duration power outage (72 hours or less) with adequate supplies at home
• Severe weather makes road travel more dangerous than shelter — blizzards, ice, active hurricane-force winds
• Civil disorder is localized to a zone you don't need to cross
• A household member has a medical condition that makes movement dangerous
• Your home is structurally sound and not in a mandatory evacuation zone

Leave when:

• A mandatory evacuation order is issued for your zone
• Floodwater is rising toward or into the structure
• A utility failure (natural gas leak, extended infrastructure loss) makes the structure uninhabitable
• Security cannot be maintained against a direct threat
• Medical needs cannot be met at home
• Supply depth drops to less than 72 hours remaining

Field note

Write your leave triggers on a card taped to the inside of a cabinet before any event. "I will leave if [X]" decided in advance resists the bias toward staying that most people feel under stress. In the moment, every hour of uncertainty feels like a reason to wait one more hour.

Supply depth by duration

The practical limit on how long you can stay is determined by your least-stocked critical resource. Water is usually the first constraint.

Duration	Water per person	Food calories per person	Notes
72-hour baseline	3 gallons (11 L)	6,000–7,500	Minimum recommended by Red Cross
2-week target	14 gallons (53 L)	28,000–35,000	Extended outage benchmark
30-day depth	30 gallons (113 L)	60,000–75,000	Full disruption planning level

These are per-person figures. A household of four at 30-day depth needs 120 gallons (454 L) of water and roughly 300,000 calories of food — manageable if planned and stored in advance, impossible to acquire after an event begins.

The water figure assumes drinking and basic hygiene only. Cooking and sanitation increase consumption; plan at 2 gallons (7.6 L) per person per day for a more realistic margin.

Home hardening for extended stay

Bugging in without hardening your home's vulnerabilities is optimism, not planning.

Entry and perimeter: Reinforce exterior door frames with 3-inch (7.6 cm) screws at strike plates. A standard strike plate uses 3/4-inch (1.9 cm) screws that grip only the door jamb trim — those can be kicked in with 50 pounds of force. Heavy-duty strike plates using 3-inch (7.6 cm) screws that penetrate into the door frame stud increase kick-in resistance to over 800 pounds of force. This is an inexpensive upgrade that takes 20 minutes and dramatically changes the entry calculus. Add a secondary deadbolt or door bar if the primary lock is a standard spring latch; a door barricade bar braced against the floor can resist several hundred additional pounds of force.

Windows: Security window film is a clear polyester film adhered to the inside of glass. It does not make windows unbreakable, but it holds shattered fragments together on impact — completely foiling a quick smash-and-grab and significantly slowing deliberate entry. Apply to all ground-floor windows. The film is inexpensive and invisible once installed.

Lighting: Motion-sensor lighting on exterior approaches deters casual opportunists and alerts you to movement. Set the sensitivity to detect movement at 15–20 feet (4.6–6 m) — close enough to be useful, far enough to give you reaction time.

Safe room designation: If your structure has multiple rooms, designate one interior room as a shelter position: typically an interior bedroom with a solid door, a deadbolt or door bar, and line-of-sight to exits. This is not a bunker — it is a position to shelter, communicate with emergency services, and wait from a position of cover rather than in an exposed entry.

Communications: A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather radio and a backup hand-crank or battery radio for local news and emergency broadcasts lets you monitor conditions without phone or internet dependency. NOAA broadcasts on seven dedicated frequencies between 162.400–162.550 MHz and operates 24/7 independent of internet and cell networks.

Sanitation: If municipal water fails, your toilet becomes a problem within 24 hours. Identify your sanitation plan before the event: a portable camping toilet with waste bags, or a bucket-and-bag system, covers the gap. A 5-gallon (19 L) bucket with a toilet seat lid, heavy-gauge bags, and kitty litter or sawdust for odor control handles household sanitation for weeks at negligible cost.

Daily household operations

A shelter-in-place period is not a waiting game — it requires structured daily management or critical systems drift into failure.

Assign roles before the event. During a bug-in:

• One person manages supply inventory and daily consumption tracking
• One person handles security and perimeter checks at intervals
• Everyone rotates cooking and water management duties

Track consumption from day one. The common failure mode is allowing consumption to run at normal rates until suddenly supplies are nearly depleted. Count what you use each day against your estimated total supply.

Daily status check template (15 minutes, every morning): 1. Water reserve — gallons (or liters) remaining versus projected need 2. Food inventory — days remaining at current consumption rate 3. Power status — generator fuel level, battery bank state of charge, critical device battery levels 4. Medical — medications taken, any health changes, critical equipment function 5. Security — any perimeter events overnight, current external conditions visible from windows 6. Information — NOAA weather radio update, local news if accessible, status from out-of-area contact

This check functions as your morning brief. It takes 15 minutes and prevents the unpleasant discovery that something has been silently running down for three days. Write the results in a notebook — tracking trends is impossible without a record.

Consumption discipline: Normal household water use is 80–100 gallons (302–378 L) per person per day. Emergency minimum is 1 gallon (3.8 L); livable minimum with basic hygiene is 2 gallons (7.6 L). The gap between those numbers — and your stored reserve — determines your effective duration. Communicate the daily number to the household from day one, not when you're at 20% remaining.

For managing household morale and the psychological demands of extended confinement, see boredom in extended emergencies.

Communications during shelter-in-place

External communication becomes more critical, not less, when you are stationary. Cell networks routinely overload during mass emergencies — voice calls fail when text messages still go through. Build communications resilience at three levels:

Receive-only (information gathering): - NOAA weather radio broadcasts 24/7 on seven frequencies (162.400–162.550 MHz) independent of internet or cell networks. A battery or hand-crank NOAA radio is the single most important communications device for a shelter-in-place. - Local AM radio stations often carry emergency management broadcasts that NOAA doesn't cover. Keep a battery-powered AM/FM receiver.

Two-way local (household and neighborhood): - FRS/GMRS handheld radios provide short-range communication between household members or adjacent neighbors. FRS requires no license; GMRS requires an inexpensive FCC license covering your entire household. Range is 1–2 miles (1.6–3.2 km) line-of-sight. - Know whether any neighbors have established a community radio net and what frequency they monitor.

Two-way regional (out-of-area contact): - Establish a daily check-in schedule with your out-of-area contact — someone outside the affected region who can relay status if local communications fail. Set a specific time twice daily. - Write down the complete communication plan — out-of-area contact name, phone numbers, alternative contact method — and give every adult in the household a copy. A plan that lives only in someone's phone is inaccessible when the phone dies.

When bug-in becomes untenable

A shelter-in-place is not a permanent decision. Conditions change. You should reassess at defined intervals — every 24 hours during a fast-moving situation, every 72 hours for slower events.

Conditions that flip a stay decision to a go decision:

• Structural damage to the building that compromises safety
• Supply level drops below 72 hours on any critical resource
• A specific threat (fire, rising water, active security breach) requires immediate movement
• A medical emergency exceeds what can be managed at home

If you need to leave after you've bugged in, your bug-out plan and pre-loaded go-bags are what enable orderly departure. Keep them accessible even during an extended stay — a bag stored in the garage instead of the car is still accessible in 90 seconds.

Practical checklist

• Write explicit stay vs. leave triggers on a card and post them before any event
• Calculate your household's supply depth at 72-hour, 2-week, and 30-day benchmarks
• Stock water to at least 2 gallons (7.6 L) per person per day for expected duration
• Identify and pre-arrange your sanitation backup before municipal water fails
• Reinforce at least one exterior door and install motion-sensor exterior lighting
• Assign daily roles and implement a morning status check from day one
• Test and verify your NOAA weather radio and out-of-area communication contact
• Keep go-bags accessible, not in storage, even during an active bug-in
• Set a 24-hour reassessment schedule and enforce it — staying is re-decided, not permanent

For the full decision between staying and leaving, see bug-out planning for the other side of this decision, and evacuation planning for the operational specifics of departure once the decision is made.