Emergency Preparedness Planning for Your Family

You may be installing the best security and burglar system in your house, you may have a large storage house of canned goods in case of outage or crisis, and you may have the most complete emergency kit in the house, but if you have don’t have an effective emergency plan, it will all just go to waste. It actually just takes less than an hour for you to formulate an emergency plan, have it printed and give each member of the family a copy. So, gather your folks around and start an emergency preparedness planning right now.

What is emergency preparedness planning by the way? Well, for starters, emergency preparedness planning refers to a set of activities or list of reminders that will orient every member of the family on what to do in case of emergencies. A disaster can be of any form, it can be of natural causes like earthquake, tornadoes, hurricanes and tsunamis which are obviously inevitable. A disaster can be an accident like gas explosion, electricity accident, fire, crime-related like burglary, home invasion or it can even be financial or economical disasters, such as money crisis, power outage and so on.

Even when you are at home, when you expect utmost safety, disaster can still take place. When you leave your love ones at home, how will you contact them in case of emergencies, where will you meet, who will they call? These are just some of the questions that can be answered when you do emergency preparedness planning with your family. So here are the steps.

First, make sure that every member of the family is present. Then start discussing the plan on the safe exits of the house. Exit doors are usually found in the kitchen, but what if the emergency took place in the kitchen, will the main door be a good option for exit. How about in rooms, do the kids have assigned routes to emergency exits? Also consider the meeting place of your family. It could be your favorite restaurant or a relative living nearby.

Assign a person who will pick up your kids when you can not make it. Have a list of contact numbers of your neighbors. Keep a list of health conditions of your family. And inform everyone in the house about the location of floor drains, gas valves, water pipes, electrical boxes and fire extinguishers. As a final thought on emergency preparedness planning, teach your family on how to be responsive and manage stress during critical moments.