Water · Evacuation and route planning
Eleven years as a county floodplain manager on the Alabama Gulf Coast, which mostly means reading several hundred accounts of how an evacuation went wrong. Renata writes the water, documents and evacuation material on this site.
Background
What does a floodplain manager do?
Reviews where people are allowed to build, inspects what happens when the water arrives, and helps run the county’s part of an evacuation.
The job puts you in front of the paperwork after a flood, which is where most of the real damage sits. Renata’s guides spend more time on documents than any other writer on this site, because she has watched what happens to a family whose deed, insurance policy and prescription list were all in one filing cabinet on a ground floor.
It also gave her a specific and unpopular opinion about kits: most households in her county will never evacuate, and will lose power almost every year. Building for the rare event first is how people end up with a spotless go bag and two days of water.
What does she write here?
Water storage and treatment, food rotation, documents, pets and livestock, and the decision of whether to leave or stay.
She also handles the parts of this site that touch official guidance, because she has spent a decade being the person who has to explain that guidance at a public meeting.
From Renata, on the most common mistake
People store water in containers they cannot lift. A full five gallon jug is forty pounds and it is on a shelf in the garage. If the person who has to carry it is 70 years old, that water does not exist. Store it in what your household can actually pick up.
- Based inFoley, Alabama
- Years in the role11 as a county floodplain manager
- Named storms worked6 landfalls, plus two inland flood events
- Writes aboutWater storage and treatment, food rotation, documents, evacuation
- Reachable at[email protected]
Build for the thing your county keeps having, not the thing you saw on television.
Renata Sowell
Where to find this work
Everything filed under Evacuation & Route Planning on this site is written or edited by Renata Sowell. The rest of the team, and how the three of us split the work, is on the page about who we are and how we test things.