What Is a Family Plan For Emergency Preparedness?

A family plan for emergency preparedness outlines what you and your family members will do to survive and stay safe in an emergency. Specifically, the plan should include details on communication, shelter, and evacuation. The plan, once written, should be practiced and reviewed often.

How Do You Prepare A Family Emergency Preparedness Plan?

To prepare a family emergency plan, first, consider which types of disasters are most likely to strike in your area. Ready.gov lists the following disasters as ones to consider. Choose a few initially from the list below that you feel are most likely to happen in your area or your home, and begin your plan there:

• Active Shooter
• Attacks in Public Places
• Avalanche
• Bioterrorism
• Chemical Emergencies
• Cybersecurity
• Drought
• Earthquake
• Explosion
• Extreme Heat
• Floods
• Hazardous Materials Incidents
• Home Fires
• Household Chemical Emergencies
• Hurricanes
• Landslides and Debris Flow
• Nuclear Explosion
• Nuclear Power Plants
• Pandemic
• Power Outages
• Radiological Dispersion Device
• Severe Weather
• Snowstorms and Extreme Cold
• Space Weather
• Thunderstorms and Lightning
• Tornadoes
• Tsunamis
• Volcanoes
• Wildfires

After choosing a few in this list that you feel are the most likely, discuss with your family how you will communicate, how you will evacuate, and how you will find shelter in each of these different emergency scenarios. When considering communication, make sure to discuss how you will communicate with each other in the case that phone services are down. In addition, a plan for receiving emergency alerts and updates. As you plan for evacuation, choose an emergency meeting place both inside and outside of your neighborhood, map out primary and secondary emergency evacuation routes, and pack a bag full of three days worth of necessary supplies to grab as you evacuate. When discussing and planning for shelter, familiarize yourself with different shelters recommended for different disasters–sheltering-in-place vs mass sheltering, for instance. Plan for each of these events.

What Are The Four Phases Of Emergency Preparedness?

The four phases of emergency preparedness planning include questioning, personalizing, writing, and practicing. Step one of emergency preparedness planning consists of discussing with your family, friends, or household members four major questions:

1. How will I receive emergency alerts and warnings?
2. What is my shelter plan?
3. What is my evacuation plan?
4. What is my household’s communication plan?

Write down and discuss the answers to these questions, and incorporate them into each of your specific preparedness plans for different disasters. Step two of emergency preparedness is to take into account the specific needs of your family. You will want to consider family size and ages of members, dietary needs, pets, medical needs, disabilities, unique challenges, and cultural considerations. This discussion will help assist you in the next step, which is writing a family emergency plan. Step three is to actually sit down and fill out your family emergency plan. You can use this one as a guide, or create your own from scratch. This plan will consist initially of emergency meeting places, taking into account if you are indoors, outdoors, outside of your town or community, or in your neighborhood. Even further than this, this family emergency plan will include a family emergency communication plan, which is critical in every emergency. Step four of our emergency preparedness plan is to practice your plan with your family. Although we would all like to think that we will react calmly, collectively, and with generosity in moments of great stress, we really have no idea until we practice.  Practicing is critical in emergency preparedness because it gives us the opportunity to do a real-time run through so that we can perform well and with greater intentionality in the face of an emergency. The more that we practice, the more consciously we can react when emotions are high.

Why Do You Need To Have A Plan In Place In Case Of An Emergency? 

A pre-outlined plan in an emergency is absolutely critical. This plan is essential because so many resources could be cut off in an emergency. We need to know beforehand how we will communicate, where we will meet, what we will do, and how we will react before it is too late. Even more than this, in the moment of panic, it will be nearly impossible to act with reason if you have not thought through situations beforehand. As we work through with our families our own personalized plan, we can become empowered to respond in ways that are safe, smart, and aligned with our values. And for all those who are parents: we will not always have direct access to our kids in an emergency. Perhaps they will be in a different room during an earthquake, or there will be an active shooter at their school, or they will get lost while camping with friends. The best thing that we can do as parents in a world where we cannot control risk for our kids is to prepare them. We can do this through writing plans with them, keeping open communication, and practicing, practicing, practicing. Although it can be terrifying to consider our kids being in danger, communicating and preparing them is critical.

Who Should Be Involved In Making The Plan?

Those within our household, or those whom we are responsible for, should be included in making our emergency preparedness plan. Involve your kids at all ages, tailoring the discussions to their level of understanding.

Why Is It Important To Practice An Emergency Plan With Your Family?

The “practice” part of the plan, although often overlooked, is just as important as all of the other parts. Preparedness is only as good as your practicing. For example, you can read 100 books on how to start an effective fire. But the moment that you are lost in the wilderness, the book knowledge is hardly as important as the actual practice of building the fire. The same is true with any emergency. Practicing for each part of an emergency with your family or household members will help you be able to actually execute the necessary steps towards survival and safety in the emergency situation.

The American Red Cross has determined that the internet is the third most common way people in the U.S. gather emergency information and contact their loved ones during an emergency. Of course, there are a lot of other ways to stay tuned in to emergencies communications—especially since victims of disasters don’t usually have access to the internet right away.  It’s important to know your options and use a variety of resources for your emergency news.

Internet Resources

There are a lot of internet resources you should have bookmarked on all your computers and smartphones in case of an emergency. You can download the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) app to your phone for preparation tips and to receive information on Disaster Recovery Centers during a disaster.

You may also want to include websites like the National Weather Service, Red Cross, and your local office of emergency management (you can find this by searching on Ready.gov or FEMA’s website).

FEMA Texts

One little-known resource is FEMA text messaging. You can sign up to receive text message updates to your phone from FEMA. This can be a great option because texts don’t need as much of a signal as a phone call and you’re more likely to have a cell phone signal than access to the internet during an emergency.

You can sign up to receive useful monthly emergency preparedness tips from FEMA by texting PREPARE to 43362 (4FEMA). Obviously, standard messaging and data rates apply to these messages. To stop the messages you just text STOP to the same number.

Radio and TV

The most obvious choices for accessing vital emergency communications are radio and TV broadcasts. If your power is out, you can listen to the radio in your car or use a portable radio from your emergency kit.

On that note, it’s a good idea to have alternatives for charging your phone and computer during an emergency. Most devices can be charged with an adapter for your car or you can get a manually operated crank charger.