Mr. Dillon is a senior staff writer for Wirecutter based in Waialua, Hawaii.

At 4:30 a.m., our dog howled. He heard the emergency sirens before we did. Through the window, my wife spotted cars pulling into the parking lot of the high school across the street — our town’s evacuation site. Texts from friends warned that a nearby stream had surged over 30 feet, and that the 120-year-old dam seven miles uphill from our home on the North Shore of the Hawaiian island of Oahu was in imminent danger of failure. Overnight on March 20, the local weather station had recorded nearly 20 inches of rain. We got up, and made a plan to get to higher ground. This was not my first evacuation.

I was 10 when I ran from my first disaster, a fire that burned my island summer camp in Belgrade, Maine,........

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