Carson City has spent the past year practicing for the worst. In April, emergency managers from Carson City and neighboring Douglas County ran a full-scale wildfire evacuation exercise for residents of Old Clear Creek and the Clear Creek Tahoe area, a months-in-the-making drill that sent people to a Temporary Evacuation Point staffed by law enforcement, Search and Rescue, the Community Emergency Response Team, and the American Red Cross while the city's Emergency Operations Center hummed to life as a multi-agency coordination group. Now the city wants residents to do their own practicing, and it is throwing a fair to make the homework less daunting.
On Wednesday, Sept. 30, Carson City Emergency Management and Carson City Health and Human Services will host the city's first Preparedness Fair at the Carson City Community Center, 851 E. William St. It runs from 2 to 5 p.m., it is free, and it is open to everyone. There is no ticket and no capacity cap, though there is one very good reason to arrive early: the first 100 families through the door get free essential supplies to build an emergency Go-Kit.
The fair is the finale of Preparedness Month and the capstone of a two-month push. CCHHS has been running a "Ready, Set, Go!" campaign from August through September, a steady drumbeat of personal-preparedness education that culminates in this single afternoon of face-to-face contact. The framework the fair is built around has four steps, and they are deliberately plain: Be Ready, meaning prepare your home and family well before danger strikes; Get Set, meaning conditions have escalated and danger is coming fast; Go Now, meaning the threat is present and you must leave without delay; and Recover, meaning the immediate danger has passed and it is time to assess and rebuild.
That four-step language is not a Carson City invention. It descends from the "Ready, Set, Go!" Wildfire Action Plan developed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, a program designed to help people living in the wildland-urban interface take a more active role in protecting their homes and, more importantly, their lives. The IAFC's premise was that in a fast-moving wildfire, the difference between a family that gets out cleanly and one that does not is usually made weeks earlier, in the quiet work of planning evacuation routes, assembling supplies, and hardening a property. Carson City, a capital ringed by high desert and steep canyons, sits squarely in the kind of landscape that framework was written for.
The fair's vendor list reflects the specific hazards of the place rather than a generic disaster checklist. Southwest Gas and NV Energy will be on hand, a nod to the utility shutoffs and gas-line questions that surface when people are forced to leave home in a hurry. The Public Works Storm Water Department will be there, which speaks to the other half of the region's risk profile: this is a landscape that burns and floods, sometimes in the same year, and the storm water crew knows exactly where the water goes when the ground is too scorched to absorb it. More vendors are expected beyond those named.
Attendees can expect interactive booths rather than a lecture hall. The city is promising face-to-face time with local safety experts, guidance on securing a home against local hazards, and the chance to ask the kind of granular questions that never quite get answered on a website. Carson City Health and Human Services will also administer public flu shots at the event, folding seasonal vaccination into the broader preparedness message, on the logic that a household that is already run down by influenza is a household that handles an evacuation poorly.
The event also quietly serves as a recruiting and visibility moment for Carson City's Community Emergency Response Team, the volunteer corps that has become a fixture of the city's disaster planning. CERT is a nationwide program of community volunteers who train to support first responders during real incidents, and Carson City's team has been active enough to draw regional recognition: at the 2025 Nevada Emergency Preparedness Association awards, Serge Duarte of Carson City CERT was named Western Nevada Partner of the Year. The team has been openly hoping to grow its ranks.
That volunteer pipeline matters because of the arithmetic of a real emergency. In April's Clear Creek exercise, the operation depended on law enforcement, Search and Rescue, CERT, Parks and Recreation, Health and Human Services, and the Red Cross all showing up at the same Temporary Evacuation Point to register evacuees and connect them with services. That kind of response does not materialize on the day of a fire. It is built through drills, training academies, and, increasingly, through low-stakes community events where residents learn what an evacuation actually asks of them before they are asked.
For anyone who has meant to get around to it, the fair is a low-cost way to start. The Go-Kit giveaway is the obvious draw, but the more durable takeaway is the four-step framework itself, which is designed to be remembered under stress. Be Ready. Get Set. Go Now. Recover. Four words, one afternoon, and a city that would rather rehearse than improvise.
For more information, call 775-887-2190 or visit carsoncity.gov/emergencymanagement.