Shelter in Place vs Evacuate: How to Decide

This site is about staying safely at home. But staying is not always the safe choice, and part of being prepared is knowing when to switch. The short answer: if officials tell you to leave, leave. If they tell you to stay inside, stay inside. The harder cases are the ones in between, when nobody has told you anything and conditions are slowly getting worse. This post covers both, with a quick decision helper at the end.

What “shelter in place” means

Sheltering in place is an official instruction, not just a choice to stay home. Alberta describes a shelter-in-place advisory as one issued when an outside hazard threatens life and leaving would be riskier, and describes sheltering as finding the safest nearby area and putting distance and barriers between you and the threat. Vancouver’s emergency guidance says these orders are usually for situations that last a few hours and are not safe to evacuate from. CDC, writing about chemical emergencies, says you might need to stay put for a few hours, possibly a few days.

Typical reasons include a chemical spill or gas release, severe storms, or very poor outdoor air.

How to shelter in place

CDC’s steps for a chemical emergency are a good general pattern:

1. Get everyone inside, including pets. Lock the doors.
2. Turn off fans, air conditioning and the furnace, and close the fireplace damper, so outside air is not pulled in.
3. Go to one room you can seal off from outside air. CDC suggests a large room, with water, ideally on a higher floor.
4. Seal it. Use duct tape and plastic sheeting over windows and vents, and tape around the door. If you have no plastic, towels, sheets or clothing will do.
5. Take your supplies: medication, phone and charger cables.
6. Stay informed by radio or a news app, follow instructions from police, fire or local officials, and let someone outside the area know you are safe.
7. Wait for the all clear before going outside.

For wildfire smoke, the approach is gentler. You do not seal yourself in, you filter the air. See making a clean-air room.

What evacuation alerts and orders mean

Terms vary by place, so learn the ones your area uses. In BC, the provincial evacuee guidance uses three stages:

Stage	What it means	What to do
Evacuation alert	Be ready to leave on short notice	Pack, fuel up, plan your route and where you will go
Evacuation order	You are at risk. Leave immediately	Go now, by the routes officials give
Rescind	The risk has passed	Return only once it is rescinded

BC’s guidance is blunt about orders: choosing to remain puts yourself and others in danger. If you are ill or have mobility needs, tell the person delivering the order. My guide to what a wildfire evacuation order means covers how terms differ elsewhere.

Leave right away if

Some situations do not wait for an order:

• Your home is on fire, or filling with smoke or gas.
• A carbon monoxide alarm sounds. Get everyone outside into fresh air, then call 911.
• Floodwater is rising toward your home.

Carbon monoxide warning. Generators, camp stoves, barbecues, charcoal, and kerosene or propane burners give off carbon monoxide, which you cannot see or smell and which can kill within minutes. Never use them indoors, or in a garage, basement, shed, tent or covered porch, even with doors and windows open. Outdoors, keep them at least 20 feet (6 m) from doors, windows and vents.

Plan to leave if

These are the slower signs that staying home is no longer working:

• Your home is too hot or too cold. The American Red Cross says to evacuate in that case.
• Someone depends on powered medical equipment and the power will not last. The Red Cross says to evacuate if you have medical devices that need power.
• Food, water or medicine is running out and help is not coming soon.
• Someone’s health is getting worse.
• An evacuation alert is in effect. It is easier to leave early, calmly, than late in traffic.

My guide on when to leave instead of staying goes through each of these.

Be ready for both

The same preparation covers staying and going. A few things make the switch easy:

• A go bag for each person, packed and by the door. See the go-bag checklist.
• A fuelled vehicle. Canada.ca suggests keeping your vehicle fully fuelled when wildfire is a risk, since refuelling may be hard during an evacuation.
• Somewhere to go. Family, friends, a hotel, or an official reception centre. Canada.ca notes that most evacuation shelters only accept service animals, so make a plan for pets. See prepping with pets.
• Documents and medication in one place. See protecting documents.
• A sealing kit for sheltering in place: duct tape, scissors and plastic sheeting, as CDC suggests.
• A way to get alerts that does not depend on the power: a battery or crank radio, and a charged phone.

If staying is the plan, the plan builder works out supplies for 3, 7, 14 or 30 days. If you have just lost power, start with the first hour of a power outage.