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How to make a household emergency plan

A plan you write before anything happens is the one that still works when the phone lines are busy and nobody is thinking clearly. Here is how to write one for your household in an afternoon, wherever you live.

S
The Stelaah team
· 3 min read

Start with the risks where you live

A plan for a coastal town in hurricane season and a plan for a city on a fault line are not the same plan. Before you write anything, list the two or three things most likely to affect your home: floods, storms, wildfires, earthquakes, heatwaves, long power cuts, or something else that is local to you.

Your national or local emergency management agency publishes this for your area. In the United States that is Ready.gov and your county emergency office; elsewhere it is usually a government emergency or civil protection service. While you are there, sign up for the official alerts in your area and write down where warnings come from, so nobody has to search for it on the day.

Write down who is in your household

List everyone who lives with you, and anyone you are responsible for who does not: an older parent nearby, a child at another parent's home. For each person, note anything that changes the plan.

  • ✓Medical needs, medicines and anything that needs power or refrigeration.
  • ✓Mobility needs, and who helps if someone cannot walk far or drive.
  • ✓Pets: carriers, food, and where they can go if you leave.
  • ✓Who is home during the day, and who is usually at work or school.

Agree how you will reach each other

Phones are the first thing to fail you: batteries run out, networks get busy, and nobody remembers numbers any more. Write every important number on paper and keep a copy in each bag and in the car.

  • ✓One contact outside your area who everyone checks in with. Calls between people far apart often get through when local lines are jammed.
  • ✓Agree that a short text comes before a call. Text messages often get through when calls do not.
  • ✓School, work and childcare emergency numbers, and how each one will contact you.

Choose two meeting places

Pick one place just outside your home, such as a neighbour's gate or a lamp post at the corner, for a sudden emergency like a fire. Pick a second place outside your neighbourhood, such as a relative's home, a library or a community centre, in case you cannot get home or have to leave the area.

Write both addresses down, and make sure children know them without needing a phone.

Plan how you would leave

If you are told to evacuate, you will not have time to think. Decide now:

  1. 1.Two routes out of your area, in case one is closed.
  2. 2.How you will travel, and what you do if the car is not available.
  3. 3.Where you will go: a friend or relative first, then an official shelter. Check which shelters accept pets.
  4. 4.What you take: the go bag for each person, medicines, documents, chargers and the pets.

Plan how you would stay

Sometimes the safer choice is to stay home. Ready.gov advises keeping at least a several-day supply of water, about one gallon per person per day, along with food that does not need cooking, a battery or hand-crank radio, a torch, batteries and a first aid kit. Note where your water, gas and electricity shut-offs are and how to use them.

If anyone relies on power for medical equipment, write down the backup plan for that first.

Practise it once, then review it each season

Walk through the plan with everyone once: the escape route from each bedroom, the meeting places, who calls who. You will find the gaps quickly. Then set two dates a year to review it, update phone numbers, and check the go bags.

A plan on paper in a known place beats a perfect plan nobody can find. Keep it with your important documents, and tell someone outside the household where it is.

Every page of this guide, ready to fill in. The Disaster Readiness and Home Inventory Kit is a 33-page fillable PDF with pages for your household, contacts, local risks, an emergency plan, an evacuation plan, a go bag and a room-by-room home inventory. The free 4-page starter covers contacts, a household plan and a go bag checklist.

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The Stelaah team

We build Stelaah and the Stelaah Store. These guides cover the everyday problems our planners, kits and tools are made for, in plain steps you can use with or without them.

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