Emergencies & Your Health

A basic family emergency plan should include:

• Collecting and updating important information (contacts, documents, medical records, etc,) for everyone in the family;
• Making sure everyone has ID;
• Creating an extended family communication plan;
• Setting up to receive emergency alerts and warnings;
• Making an evacuation plan, and assembling materials for an evacuation kit for everyone.

Once you've got a plan, make sure everyone in the plan knows what to do. Review it together (maybe also practice or rehearse), so that people can move quickly in an emergency.

Make Sure You Can Communicate

Being able to communicate with each other in an emergency is key! 

A family communication plan should:

• Identify an out-of town contact for every member of your household;
• Equip your family with the contact’s phone number and a cell phone or prepaid phone card;
• Make sure everyone is prepared to use text messaging if a voice call cannot go through.

More on making phone calls in emergencies:

Our phones are our lifelines - but it's easy to forget that they're affected by power outages and disasters too.

When an emergency or disaster effects an area, the FCC advises that we:

• Call 911 only when no local phone numbers are available for highway accidents or other non-life-threatening incidents.
• Limit non-emergency phone calls so emergency response teams can get through. (Making one phone call to an out-of-area emergency contact so that person can then notify other family, friends, and work colleagues helps with this.)
• Wait at least 10 second before redialing a call that doesn't connect.
• Try using text in non-emergency situations.
• Conserve cell phone's battery by putting it in "airplane" mode or turning it off when not actually using it (so it doesn't use power constantly looking to make a connection).
• If evacuated, forward a home landline to cell phone.

This video has captions in Chinese, English, Filipino, French, Korean, Spanish, & Vietnamese.