Kit Sandoval Has Two Slide Decks and You Weren't Supposed to See the Other One

Kit Sandoval does not exist, exactly. But if you've attended a county emergency-preparedness workshop anywhere along Colorado's Front Range in the last five years, the kind held in a church basement or community center with folding chairs and a projector that takes three tries to connect, you've probably met someone like her. A former wildland firefighter who moved into community education after a knee gave out, she's spent five years teaching the FEMA checklist to people who nod along and then go home to apartments where there's nowhere to put 56 gallons of water. She is a composite, drawn from documented program structures, published research on preparedness gaps, and the institutional realities facing county-level educators across Colorado. Her name is a coincidence she finds less funny than you do.

We spoke on a Thursday afternoon in late August. She was between workshops, one that morning for a senior center in the foothills, one that evening for a mobile home park community near the WUI. She had two different slide decks open on her laptop.

You have two slide decks?

Kit: Yeah. Technically I have one. The official one. And then I have the one I actually use, which started as the official one with some notes in the margins and has become... its own animal. I haven't told anyone I have two. I'm telling you, I guess. Don't put my county's name on this.

What's the difference between them?

Kit: The official deck follows the FEMA framework. Build a kit. Make a plan. Be informed. It's good advice! Genuinely. The 72-hour kit is a real thing that helps real people. But it was designed for a household that has a garage, a car, some savings, and enough square footage to store a hundred pounds of water without losing their living room.¹ When I started this job in 2021, maybe half my audience matched that description. Now it's less.

How much less?

Kit: I stopped counting. It was making me sad.

Walk me through what happens when you present the standard kit list to someone who doesn't match those assumptions.

Kit: The water thing is the one that breaks people's brains. FEMA says one gallon per person per day, minimum three days, ideally two weeks.¹ For a family of four, two weeks is 56 gallons. That's roughly 448 pounds of water. I used to say that number out loud in workshops and watch people's faces do the math. A woman in a studio apartment once raised her hand and said, "Where would I put that? I don't have room for a second nightstand." She wasn't being difficult. She was doing the spatial math in real time, and she was right. The water would take up more floor space than her kitchen.

Then there's the go-bag. Standard advice: keep a bag packed near your door or your car so you can grab it and leave when evacuation orders come. Makes total sense if you have a house with a front hallway and a car in the driveway. But if you're on the third floor of an apartment building and your car is in a lot across the complex? The Marshall Fire went from ignition to destroying over a thousand homes in under six hours.² The geometry of a stairwell and a parking lot is a real constraint that the checklist doesn't acknowledge.

And then there's the one I think about most. The checklist says to keep copies of important documents in a waterproof container in your kit.¹ Fine. But I work with families where those documents are needed every day. Work. Medical appointments. School enrollment. You can't seal your ID in a go-bag if you need it Tuesday morning. Technically correct advice. Practically useless for a chunk of my audience.

When did you start changing what you teach?

Kit: It wasn't some principled stand. More like erosion. After the Marshall Fire, I started getting renters in my workshops. Three hundred and forty renters were displaced in that fire.³ A lot of them showed up to preparedness classes afterward wanting to know what they should have done differently. And I'd stand there with my FEMA slide deck thinking, most of this doesn't apply to you. You can't harden a building you don't own. You can't store two weeks of food in a unit where you're already sharing a bedroom with your kids. A study on those displaced renters found they were less insured, more likely to be displaced outside the county, and less engaged in recovery policymaking.³ They weren't less prepared because they were careless. They were less prepared because the preparation framework assumed a house they didn't live in.

So I started annotating. I'd teach the checklist and then say, "Now, if you're in an apartment, here's what I'd actually focus on." And the actually list looks different. It's more about relationships than objects. Know your building manager's name. Know which neighbor has a car. Know where your building's water shutoff is. If you can't store 56 gallons, store what you can and know where the nearest water distribution point would be set up. None of that is on the official slides.

Is that better advice?

Kit: I genuinely don't know. No study establishes outcome differences between standard and modified preparedness curricula.⁴ I can't prove it works better. I just know the standard version produces a room full of people who leave feeling like they failed before they started.

You mentioned mobile home parks. What's different there?

Kit: Everything. A University of Colorado study, the first one that actually looked at mobile home park residents in the WUI, found that manufactured homes are uniquely vulnerable to wildfire in ways that can't be mitigated.⁵ The physical characteristics driving the risk are, and I'm quoting here, "immutable." You can't harden a mobile home the way you harden a stick-built house. So evacuation preparedness becomes everything. But evacuation assumes a vehicle, and not everyone has one. The study found residents wanted information tailored to their actual homes, not the generic homeowner version.⁵ That's what I'm trying to do, except I'm one person with two slide decks and a county email address. I don't even have a budget line. I have a laptop and a Costco membership for buying workshop snacks.

What do you wish the official curriculum would say?

Kit: That the checklist is a menu, not a mandate. That if you can do three things instead of thirty, here are the three that matter most. That knowing your neighbors is a preparedness action.

And, okay, this sounds small, but: that it's okay to start with a gallon of water under your bed and a phone charger in a ziplock bag. Because right now the message is "do all of this or you're unprepared," and for a lot of people the honest response is "then I guess I'm unprepared," and they stop listening. I'd rather have someone do 10 percent of the list than feel so overwhelmed they do zero.

Do you think FEMA knows about this gap?

Kit: They have a "low-and-no-cost preparedness" page that suggests building your kit one grocery trip at a time and notes that community food banks can help stock your emergency supplies.⁶

What's in your personal emergency kit?

Kit: [laughs] I rent a two-bedroom in Lakewood. I have three gallons of water, a first aid kit, a hand-crank radio I got for Christmas, and my neighbor Maria's phone number. Maria has a truck.

Kit Sandoval is a composite character. The institutional structures, research findings, preparedness gaps, and program realities described in this interview are documented and sourced below. If you recognize her, it's because she's in every county.

Footnotes

1. FEMA/Ready.gov, "Build a Kit," accessed August 2026. https://www.ready.gov/kit ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Colorado Sun reporting on the Marshall Fire, 2022. The fire destroyed at least 1,233 homes in under six hours, making it the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. ↩

3. Dickinson, K., Rumbach, A., Albright, E., and Crow, D., "Renter Experiences After Colorado's Marshall Fire," Natural Hazards Center Quick Response Report, 2023. https://hazards.colorado.edu/quick-response-report/renter-experiences-after-colorados-marshall-fire ↩ ↩²

4. No reviewed study establishes outcome differences between standard and modified preparedness curricula. This gap in the evidence base is itself documented in the research for this piece. ↩

5. Goolsby, J.B. et al., "Preparing Mobile Home Park Residents for Wildfire in Lake County, Colorado," Natural Hazards Center Quick Response Report, 2024. https://hazards.colorado.edu/quick-response-report/preparing-mobile-home-park-residents-for-wildfire-in-lake-county-colorado ↩ ↩²

6. FEMA/Ready.gov, "Low and No Cost Preparedness," accessed August 2026. https://www.ready.gov/low-and-no-cost ↩