How to make a family emergency preparedness plan with PDF template download and step-by-step instructions. What to prepare for, how to prepare, and why to prepare. Lessons learned as a professional emergency manager to help you be an emergency manager for your own home and family.
Your family is important to you…probably. A Family Emergency Plan can help you keep them safe, even in the midst of the constant chatter of terrible things in the news, on social media, and just about everywhere else, so how do you make a family emergency plan?? Well, it’s simpler than you might think, and other than tuning out all those fearful voices, it all starts with understanding your basic needs…and downloading the FREE Family Emergency Plan Template!
In order to create your own family emergency plan, you have to know what to plan for. Hazards are bad things that happen, emergencies are when bad things happen to you. With the FREE Family Emergency Preparedness Plan template, you will be well on your way to preparing your family for the disasters most likely to directly impact you, your life, or your safety, but read on, because I am going to give you some insight into your plan and how to make it work for you and your family.
Emergency planning is part of what I do professionally. I am an emergency manager. It is as completely cool and also sometimes as boring as it sounds, but what it means is that I look at possible emergencies and disasters, how they might affect my organization or community, what we’ve done to prepare, and what we still need to do. In order to continue “business as usual,” or as close to it as possible, we need to define what that is, or, in other words, what do we need to do and how do we do it? What are our essential functions and needs? Your family disaster planning process is pretty much the same. An emergency preparedness plan doesn’t make you prepared on its own, but it will help you know what you need to do to prepare, and will certainly help you know how to respond when an emergency occurs. After you have your plan, you will have a framework for what you need to do from the moment you are notified of an emergency until the situation stabilizes and you are safe with your family.
What should a family emergency plan include? What each family’s plan will include varies a little from family to family, but let’s cover the basics everyone needs to consider:
How will you know when an emergency happens? Sometimes it is obvious, such as when the ground is shaking from an earthquake or there is a lot of smoke or flames from a fire, but other hazards may be more subtle and could leave you unaware until it is too late, so do everything you can to be aware of things as they happen and make sure you are receiving all the alerts and notifications you can.
Many of you remember the false alarm in Hawaii in 2018. During a State emergency exercise, instead of simulating an emergency message, one participant sent an actual alert, which said to take cover because a ballistic missile was inbound, understandably causing quite a bit of panic and concern. While it turned out okay (for everyone except that employee), it was a wake-up call, and one thing it showed the rest of us is the capability some jurisdictions have to push geographically targeted mass notifications out to cell phones directly. These also include Amber Alerts, which most people are familiar with. Some of these government alerts you can opt-out of, unlike the Presidential alert, which has mandatory automatic enrollment nationwide and can be sent to every cell phone in the country. Many jurisdictions have an opt-in service, which means you have to sign up for it, it doesn’t happen automatically. The best way to find out if your area has these is to search online for “[Your city or county name] Emergency Alerts” and you’ll find out if they have one.
You can also download an emergency alert app, such as “Emergency!” from the Red Cross, and you can customize which alerts you would like to receive, including things like flash flood warnings and tornado warnings.
It is important to know the difference between “watch” and “warning.” If you put someone on a tower to keep “watch,” it would be because you thought something bad could possibly happen, or the conditions were right for it to happen. When it happens, or is about to happen, that person on the tower signals the “warning.” So in a watch, you should be on your guard, and in a warning, you should take action.
A great article about Watch vs Warning can be found here: https://weatherworksinc.com/news/watch-vs-warning
Depending on the emergency, you may have to either shelter in the safest part of your own home, or, if your home is compromised, evacuate to a safer location. Knowing these locations ahead of time can make all the difference, which is why you should identify these locations and how to get there in your family emergency plan. I follow a basic rule: If the hazard is outside, stay inside; if the hazard is inside, go outside. It’s not 100%, but it gets to the point because wherever the hazard is, you 100% need to stay away from it.
A few years back, my family and I were going through a tornado warning. We were living in a three-story townhouse. We went down to the ground level and all bunched up in the bathroom, the only interior room we had. Well, everything turned out alright, and what really made the difference (other than not getting hit by a tornado) was the emergency supplies we had. We didn’t have to use much from our family emergency kit, but we did pull out some “emergency” chocolate and turned on a movie on my phone. I always try to keep a kids’ movie downloaded on either a phone or tablet, so even without internet or power, we can still keep the kids occupied and distracted, and help them calm down if they are scared.
You may need to shelter if there is a tornado, or a hurricane you could not evacuate from, or even a HAZMAT/CBRN incident. Your family emergency preparedness plan should identify one location within your home as your safe shelter location. You generally want to be on the lowest level in an interior, windowless room. If there is a risk of respiratory hazard, like you would get from a HAZMAT spill, you would want to turn off your ventilation system and seal off the openings. Basically, you want to find a safe room within your home, and, if possible, store some of your emergency supplies such as a 72-hour kit there, plus some of your comfort/distraction items.
In some situations, such as a hurricane, house or wild fire, or a flood, you may need to evacuate your home. This could be referred to as “bugging out,” but that usually has some apocalyptic undertones to it. However you think of it, it just means that you will be going from one unsafe or compromised location to a safer location. It doesn’t have to be a cabin in the woods, or a bunker in the mountains, it could be a hotel room downtown. When you are forced to evacuate your home, if at all possible, you should take an emergency kit with you, but don’t delay your departure to grab anything if it will put you in danger. If you can get your kit, or if you keep one in your car, it will help you provide the basic necessities for yourself and your family, even if you are otherwise unable to acquire those things.
Initially, you will need to exit your home. The family emergency planning guide contains graph paper on which you can draw a basic floor plan of your home with emergency exit routes marked, like this:
Your evacuation map doesn't need to be complicated. It is not an emergency reference, because you will not remember to look at your plan or have the time to do it. You need to have it worked out in your mind already. The family emergency plan evacuation map is for planning purposes and is a tool to identify the best exit routes, so you can practice them. It can be done on the computer, or using pen, markers, crayons, or whatever you have on the grid paper included in the family emergency plan template. It may be helpful to mark your route in red.
When evacuating, you should have a meeting location near your home, but out of immediate danger. For example, if your home is burning, you could meet your family at the mailbox, neighborhood playground, or a neighbor’s house. Just make sure it is identified in your family emergency plan and everyone knows the location, and you practice meeting there. If your entire neighborhood is inaccessible or you need to evacuate, you should also have a meeting location outside your community. This could be a friend or relative’s house, your workplace, library, church, your favorite ice cream shop, or some other easy to remember and easily accessible location. You could also consider a couple out-of-town meeting locations in different directions from your home. These locations should be written in your family preparedness plan and each member of the family should be aware of them and know how to get there. Helping children memorize any pertinent addresses is also a good idea.
In your family disaster plan, you should include immediate lifesaving actions you might need to take. For example, in an earthquake, you should Drop, Cover, and Hold On. These actions are primarily disaster-based, and this is one of the only times where the specific hazard is our focus, because we will otherwise almost always focus instead on your needs, or how the hazard affects you. Because the hazard affects your life or safety directly, you will act accordingly. Here are a few examples, and while they won’t cover everything, they will give you an idea of what actions you should prepare for. Your plan is not a disaster manual, so we will not be going in-depth on any particular emergency, but we will list some in your plan to help you work through the planning process mentally. It will also be very important for you to actually conduct emergency drills, which we'll talk about later.
Communication can make all the difference in an emergency. Fortunately, most of us carry mini supercomputers around in our pockets. That's also a great place to store emergency contacts. Unfortunately, in a large disaster, phone calls often have a hard time going through because everyone in an area is trying to make a call at the same time, and the system can only handle so much at once. Text messages are much more likely to go through, and you could even use a messaging or social media app to communicate with family and friends. While we may be more dependent on technology than ever, never have we had more capabilities for dealing with hard times.
Because a specific geographical area may have hard times with phone calls within that area, those calling an out-of-town number usually have better success. This is why your family communication plan, or the part of your family emergency plan dedicated to communication, should have an out-of-state contact every member of the family can reach out to. You should include their phone number, email address, and social media and messaging handles. This person should know they are the contact and should also share information about the rest of the family.
Receiving information about the emergency can be just as important. Monitor radio, television, social media, and news apps to gain situational awareness and official messaging from local authorities.
When developing a family emergency plan, you cannot rule out any impact the hazard might have on you or your family. Some hazards could potentially affect some people worse than others, either because of where they are when the incident occurs, or because of any sort of access and functional need, special or restricted diets, and more. Even someone who wears glasses should make those glasses part of their plan, and even include their eyeglass prescription with the rest of the important documents.
Talk to your workplace and children’s schools and get a copy of their emergency plans so you know what to expect if a disaster occurs there, and how family reunification would occur. These places are required to have emergency procedures in place.
After the emergency, you want to get back to normal as soon as possible. Recovery is a topic seldom covered in preparedness circles, because the focus is often on the end of the world as we know it or doomsday scenarios. Well, since humanity as a whole has survived 100% of the disasters it has faced, we’re not going to play that game here. Yes, bad, long-lasting, and world-changing disasters have happened and will happen, but the basic principles of preparedness remain the same.
Recovery begins as soon as the emergency occurs, and it needs to be considered ahead of time in your family emergency plan. Everything you do is leading to getting back to normal. There are some things you can do to help you recover more quickly. First, you should be insured, in pretty much every way. You should insure your health, life, home, and car. Additionally, you should have all your important documents in order, including copies of birth and marriage certificates and social security cards, bank account and credit card information, identification, pictures of family members or identification, and any other important or sentimental documents.
Your information and documents should be stored in a safe place, and you should have digital copies of everything. A thumb drive could be handy, but so could a secure online storage that can be accessed from anywhere.
What good is that family emergency plan just sitting on your shelf? Not much good at all. In fact, some studies have shown that only having an emergency plan can make organizations less prepared…IF they aren’t involved in the planning process and if they don’t follow up planning with drills and exercises. The planning process itself has tremendous value, the way we’ve done it here, because you are the one who has thought through each emergency with your own needs and circumstances in mind, and you will be the one responding to it. Just by thinking through these things, you’ve already mentally rehearsed it! The most valuable part is what comes next: Drills and exercises.
This is not only important, it’s fun! These drills can be a game. When I do drills and exercises, drills are meant to train or reinforce a specific task, and an exercise is more of a test. Now, very importantly, when I run an exercise, I am not testing the participants, and they need to know this. Yes, they sometimes do the wrong thing, but they aren't failing the exercise, the exercise is revealing what we need to do better, which is to provide better training. In other words, a drill teaches the participant, but an exercise teaches the emergency manager. At the end of an exercise, if the tasks weren't performed to standard, we revisit the training, but if it was performed to standard but the desired result didn't occur, we revisit the plan. That's pretty much it. There is no shame for any participant, and they should be encouraged to give feedback, not only on how well they did or what they feel they could improve, but also about what they thought went well or not so well with the exercise itself.
Exercises progress in scope and complexity. They begin by talking about it. You ask questions to prompt a response. This is a discussion-based exercise. Hands on drills come next, as you and your family are learning the basics. This can be taken at a slow pace to make sure everyone understands each part of it.
Functional and full-scale exercises include performing exercise functions at or near real time, and should be high-fidelity simulations, meaning they should be as realistic or true-to-life as possible (within reason). We should remember that you don't need to wake up your toddlers in the middle of the night with a fog machine to simulate smoke and the smoke detectors blaring; that would be an unreasonable level of realness. However, you can simulate some complex factors as they grow, such as limited exit options, or dealing with an injured family member. All of it should be age-appropriate so you can ensure they understand what is happening and what to do, but also so you don't scar them for life and leave them with trauma that they'll have to work through as an adult. Remember, we are not fear-based, so if it even gets close to that, pump the brakes.
Depending on their age and capabilities, you can drill specific tasks, like rolling out of bed, crawling along the floor, and feeling the door for heat. Or just crawling on the floor at first! Again, make it a game. This should never not be enjoyable.
Make it a regular habit to practice and exercise emergency actions several times a year. You could commit one family night a month, or twenty minutes on a Saturday every quarter, all depending on your situation. You want to cover all immediate response actions for the hazards we talked about above, and any more you can think of, and you also want it to be frequent enough to retain some of what you learn, so try it out and see what works for you. Scheduling something means you'll be more likely to do it, but it can be fun to throw a spontaneous drill in there every once in a while, especially in a new location or environment, so have your family identify exits at a grocery store, or have them tell you what they would do if there was an earthquake RIGHT NOW, or what you should do if there's a tornado warning while you're driving on the road to see grandma.
A Note about Children :
You could use current events to help them understand what happens and what to do, but don't let them get overwhelmed with the doomscrolling or the 24-hour news cycle repeating the same tragic news all day. Kids are capable of understanding quite a lot of what is going on in the world, but you don't need to expose them to all the terrible things. Kids are resilient, but they also are sometimes not coping healthily, they are just psychologically and physiologically compensating better than adults. until they crash. So be reasonable. Answer their questions honestly and you don't have to give them the gory details about disasters, but, as Mr. Rogers said "Look for the helpers."
In fact, you can be the helper. Involve your family in service, especially if you are serving someone who has been affected by a disaster. When they learn they can do something to solve the problem, the problem's impact on them is diminished. Involving them in the entire family emergency plan process will help your entire family be more empowered and prepared.
So there you have it, your very own family disaster preparedness plan! When you have completed your planning guide, you will have identified and developed the critical parts of your family emergency preparedness plan. You will have also made a plan for practicing your response to specific emergencies. Your plan is important, but practicing it is essential.
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