A good emergency plan answers a few boring questions before they become urgent ones. Where do we go? How do we get there? Who takes care of whom? And how do we find each other if everyone is in a different place when it starts?
Start with the household plan. Then add the pieces that apply to where and how you live. Most households need three or four of these pages, not eleven.
Build the Household Plan First
Four pages cover the household plan, and they're not repeats of each other. One is the thinking, one is the form, and two solve one of the most fragile parts of the plan — staying in touch when phones don't cooperate.
Home Emergency Plans is where to start if nothing is written down yet — it works out what your household decides. Family Emergency Plans is the same content as a form to print, for people who'd rather fill in blanks than read reasoning. The other two go deeper on the piece that breaks first: what to do when the network is congested, and the paper list that survives a dead phone.
If you have an hour, do the first two. If you have ten minutes, print the contact sheet and nothing else.
Know When to Leave — and Where to Go
Leaving and staying are opposite instructions, and you don't get to choose which one you'll be given. Both need work in advance: routes and rally points for one, a room and supplies for the other.
The evacuation pages split the same way as the household ones. One is the plan you draw — exits, routes, where everyone regroups. The other is the list you follow in the minutes before you go, organised by how much warning you got, because five minutes and a full day call for completely different actions.
Shelter in Place is the opposite case, and it has its own logic: the right room depends on the hazard, and the room that protects you from a tornado is not the one that protects you from a chemical release.
Leave
If authorities order an evacuation, or the building or location is unsafe. Go early rather than late.
Stay
If authorities instruct you to shelter in place, or remaining indoors is clearly safer than moving.
When a warning is active, the decision is not yours to make from a web page. Follow local authorities and official emergency instructions first — these guides exist so that you've already done the preparation when the instruction arrives.
Make the Plan Fit the People and the Place
A single plan doesn't fit every household, and pretending otherwise is how good advice becomes useless advice. Reduced mobility can change both how you leave and how early you need to make that decision. An apartment removes the garage, the generator and the yard that most preparedness writing quietly assumes you have.
Read the relevant one alongside the household plan, not instead of it. They adjust the plan, they don't replace it.
Keep the Information Usable
Plans go stale quietly. Phone numbers change, children change schools, vehicles change and documents expire. Treat the plan as something you maintain, not something you finish.
Two pages support that. Emergency Documents covers the paperwork itself — which originals travel with you and which only need a scan. Emergency Checklists & Templates is the index of every printable on the site, if you'd rather work from sheets than from guides.
Once a year
- Review contacts
- Review meeting points
- Review the evacuation route
- Update documents
- Walk through the plan
Tie that review to something you already do once a year, like testing the smoke alarms. A plan reviewed on a schedule stays true; a plan reviewed when someone remembers doesn't.