Simple Home Disaster Readiness

Why most planning is simple

Preparations

Planning

• Buy appropriate insurance.
• Locate the cutoffs for the water, gas, and electricity. There may be special tools to operate them, know where they are.
• Make sure children can recite their name, address, & phone number.
• Pick two out-of-area relatives who messages could be left with in case of separation. Pick relatives most family members would know the phone number of. Tell the family members to leave messages there in case of separation.
• Identify a "back-road" route to use to get out of the area when the highways are clogged. This is handy to know about on holiday weekends. The route does not have to be fast, just less likely to be completely clogged.
• Identify an auxiliary source of water, such as a pool, hot tub, or creek ahead of time to flush toilets.
  

Getting people ready

• Motivate everyone to make a travel bag. This is everything they need for an overnighter or a week-long vacation (except clothes) in one small bag. Travel bags save a frustrating hour of  rounding stuff up every time someone wants to spend the night somewhere.
• Some emergency management offices keep lists of people with functional needs. Make sure they know about your loved ones if appropriate.
• Educate yourself about insurance issues before a crisis occurs. If you need insurance, you probably won't be in the right frame of mind to carefully research how to not be taken advantage of. One web site dedicated to this is http://www.disasterprepared.net/ (this listing is not an endorsement).

Getting the home ready

• Install a smoke detector and a carbon monoxide detector. Keep the batteries fresh. Most houses have smoke detectors; the ones that do not have most of the fires. Inspectors find that 1/3 of all smoke detectors have missing batteries.
• Test your smoke alarms regularly to ensure they make a loud beep when needed. Fire departments recommend doing this monthly.
  
• Keep two pocket flashlights and spare batteries. Hide them if necessary. Keep a flashlight by your bed where you can find it without fumbling around in the dark. Keep the batteries fresh.
• Make sure there are enough blankets for a cold night with no heat.
• Own some basic tools, like a claw hammer & nails, screwdrivers, big pliers, and an adjustable wrench.
• Keep a fire extinguisher rated for grease in the kitchen. Shake the fire extinguishers every 6 months to keep the powder from caking.
• Keep an escape ladder in every upper-story bedroom. Make sure they are stored for easy access and everyone knows how to use them.
• Clean your gutters annually.
• Install a sump pump and flood alarm in the basement. Make sure the battery backup can run for at least an hour.
  
• Anchor water heaters, fuel oil tanks, bookcases & cabinets to the wall to prevent toppling.
• Put foam sleeves over exposed exterior pipes.
• Keep 10 gallons of gasoline in a non-sparking can if possible. Put stored gasoline in your tank and buy new gasoline every year.
• Keep a home disaster box hidden away for riding out disasters at home.
• Keep an evacuation pack hidden away in case the disaster makes you leave home.
• A lot of disasters rip stuff off the wall. A moderate earthquake can hit anywhere on the planet and make an entire city want wallboard fasteners, and the first one to the hardware store wins. Keep a supply of wallboard fasteners on hand, in several kinds. A ripped-out fastener leaves a hole bigger than a pencil, so keep fasteners that can re-use those holes. Also keep fasteners for virgin wallboard.

Getting everything else ready

• Put a family zip-kit in every car. If some people get around without cars, motivate them to put a personal zip-kit in their backpack or bike-bag.
  
• Own a safe deposit box. Store deeds, birth certificates, documents, insurance information, photos documenting the house, and computer backups in it. Leaving copies of these items with a relative in a distant city instead also works. Open safe deposit boxes annually or some states will gleefully seize the contents. Keep the information up to date.
  
• Collar, tag, and/or chip your pets. This way you can be re-united with your pet if someone rescues it.
• Make sure you can receive local alerts. Do an Internet search on "emergency alerts" and your city name to see what's available and how to receive them.
• Use a USB thumb drive as a key fob. Load it with emergency information, your contact list, photos of your loved ones, prescriptions, insurance information, automobile information, medical equipment information, and so forth. It has lots of room, load it with everything you can think of. It should not have your car description, licence plate number, or home address if it is a key fob.
• You can download disaster readiness and notification apps for your mobile devices. Be aware that wireless communications are brittle and easily disrupted once trouble starts.

Living ready

• Do you have any important information on your computer? Back it up regularly, because your computer and its hard drive will fail. Put every other backup in a different building (your drawer at work, your safe deposit box, your relative's house, upload it somewhere, etc). Fires and thieves take both the computers and the backups.
• Losing a purse or wallet while traveling can have serious consequences. You and your spouse should each have a credit card that nobody else has. That way you always have a working credit card.
  
• Organize a camping kit. This is great to have in case you must leave home. Organize a family camping trip for whoever you can get to come at least once per year and make it fun.
• Own a cell phone and keep the batteries charged.
• Maintain a list of emergency phone numbers - police, fire, and rescue agencies; power companies; insurance providers; family, friends and co-workers; etc. - and program them into your phone. Other good places are a USB key-fob or a fireproof box, where you can include account numbers.
• Store the number of a person to contact in your phone book under ICE (In Case of Emergency) so authorities know who to call in an emergency should you be unable to.
  
• Your cell phone provider may offer a free backup service to preserve your contact list.
  
• You may be able to get locator service for your family's cell phones.
  
• Women should always have a scarf. Most people on the planet always have some sort of scarf or bandana, except for urban/suburbanites in safe industrialized countries. Scarves have hundreds of practical and fashion uses. See the separate pictorial scarf research document.
• Establish good relations with your neighbors. They are priceless in emergencies. Good neighbors can make your life easier in the best of times.
• When you interact with a contractor, plumber, or hardware store manager, maintain a simple long-term relationship. They are good to know when problems occur.
• The most important thing to have after a disaster is help from others. The way you get it is to help others as much as you can when they have difficulties.
• Don't be out of shape. Exercise daily.

Last minute preparations

• You can prepare if the disaster is coming, but hasn't arrived yet. Weather and fire related disasters can provide several days notice. The problem is that the hardware store will be sold out of what you need. You can order anything on the Internet and have it shipped next-day-air.