Family Emergency Planning
No matter what your political perspective is on global warming, virtually all parts of the planet are experiences more violent, more frequent and more powerful and more diverse natural events than in recent history. All indicators are that this trend will continue and increase as time goes by.
Additionally, our world is fraught with man-made dangers as well. Terrorism in terms of bombings, shootings and a multitude of other potential methods is a risk that is far more frequent than any time in our history.
You have really just two choices as to how best to protect your family: React to emergencies by relying upon government services to meet their needs entirely. Or you can prepare your family for predictable risks and plan to mitigate the impact.
Your family’s plan can be as detailed and broad as you care to make it. But it is a lot of work to create your plan, test it and maintain it. Depending upon your family’s circumstances, creating the emergency capabilities for sheltering in place with no external devices for any extended period of time can be expensive as well.
You have to decide how much effort, expense and protection that your family is willing to invest to get the Emergency Plan it requires or desires.
Building Your Family’s Emergency Plan:
I have assembled some tools to get you started. Listed below are an Editable Generic Family Emergency Plan document and instructions on how to do global edits in Microsoft Word and in Apple Pages. Simply download the MS Word Version of the Generic Emergency Plan and follow the Microsoft or Apple Pages Family Emergency Plan Customization Guide as you prefer. Apple Pages has no trouble importing MS Word files and exporting them into whatever format you might prefer for your plan.
Microsoft Word DocumentsL
Family Emergency Plan Customization Guide
Editable Generic Emergency Plan
Apple Pages Documents:
Family Emergency Plan Customization Guide
Editable Generic Emergency Plan
Preventative Action Takes Effort
To prevent predictable risks from having terrible consequences takes real effort. You have to do the work up front to understand what your risks are and what reasonable actions you can take to mitigate their impact to your family. It should and ultimately must a whole family activity as the real thing surely will be. Its really very simple. You can educate yourself about the predictable risks, find out the available services to prevent these kinds of events from impacting your family and then decide if you want to take action to improve your family’s preparedness for these predictable events or not. Just going through the planning process will help make your family safer. If you do more – build evacuation and shelter in place kits, get first aid training, etc. it will take time and some money. But mostly it will take more work that pretty much only you and your family members can do and must do together. Turn it into a family project. Just do the work and hope you never need to use the products.