OUR STORY
Built after a fire. For the next one.
We live in Southern Oregon. Every summer the trees dry out and the sky turns into a coin flip. Lightning starts fires. Humans start fires. And when the wind kicks up, things get out of hand fast.
Last year the Neil Creek Fire started less than a mile from our house. Attack planes dropped retardant over the ridge. Pairs of helicopters worked the fire line all day, every day, for weeks. For three straight nights we went to bed with our phones on the pillow, evacuation alerts armed, vehicles packed with the kids' things, the animals, sleeping bags, food, water — everything we'd need to get out.
The firefighters held the lines. We were blessed. But that first night, I was up until four in the morning digging through filing cabinets, hunting for passports and insurance declarations, copying account numbers onto a legal pad because my hands were shaking too much for a pen. My wife was loading photo albums into the truck while I argued with a scanner that wouldn't connect to WiFi.
I thought I was prepared. I was not prepared.
Everything I needed was scattered across four devices, three email accounts, a filing cabinet I hadn't opened in two years, and a Google Drive folder called "Important Stuff" that contained exactly one document: a scan of my son's birth certificate from 2019, slightly crooked.
After the fire was contained, I sat down and started writing things down. All of them. Insurance policy numbers. Pediatrician's after-hours line. Gas shutoff location. Our kids' allergies. Everything that mattered, on paper, in one place. That legal pad became a binder. The binder became a system. The system became HRDCOPY.
"The best time to build your manual is when you're rich on time and low on stress. Not at four in the morning with smoke on the horizon."
What HRDCOPY does
HRDCOPY builds you a personalized household emergency manual — your medical info, financial accounts, evacuation plans, utility shutoffs, emergency contacts, and everything else your family needs when the grid goes down. It takes about 30 minutes. You get a PDF you can print at home or a professionally bound book delivered to your door.
Paper doesn't need WiFi. It doesn't need a password. It doesn't die when the power goes out. It just works.