How to make a family emergency communication plan

What the plan has to answer

Ready.gov, the Department of Homeland Security's preparedness site, starts from a plain fact: your family may not be together when a disaster strikes, so you need to know how you will contact one another and how you will reconnect if you are separated. Its Make a Plan page breaks the work into four steps: meet with your household, assess your household's needs, write the plan down, and practice it.

For the first conversation, Ready.gov suggests five questions. How will we receive emergency alerts and warnings? What is our shelter plan? What is our evacuation route? What is our family or household communication plan? Do we need to update our emergency kit? This guide covers the fourth question, which is the one most families skip because it feels obvious until the phones stop working.

The American Red Cross frames it the same way in three steps: talk through the emergencies most likely where you live, learn, work and play; give each person a role; and practice as much of the plan as you can. Both organizations publish free templates, so the job is mostly deciding, not designing.

Pick one out-of-town contact

The center of a communication plan is a single person outside your area whom everyone checks in with. Ready.gov's Ready Kids planning page tells families to pick the same person for each family member to contact and to pick someone out of town, because they may be easier to reach in a disaster. The Red Cross gives the reason: it may be easier to text or call long distance when local phone lines are overloaded or out of service.

Choosing one person matters more than it sounds. If six relatives each try to reach each other, every call competes for the same strained network. If each person sends one message to the same contact, that contact becomes the place where the whole picture comes together, and everyone else can ask one person instead of calling around.

FEMA's fillable Family Emergency Communication Plan card keeps two separate slots: an In Case of Emergency (ICE) contact and an out-of-town contact, each with a mobile number, home number, email and address. Fill in both, so the card names someone to call in an emergency as well as the person the whole family reports to.

Choose meeting places at more than one distance

Phones are only half of reconnecting. The Red Cross recommends choosing two places to meet: one right outside your home, for a sudden emergency such as a fire, and one outside your neighborhood, in case you cannot return home or are asked to evacuate.

FEMA's card goes further and has four lines for meeting places, each with its own instructions: indoor, neighborhood, out-of-neighborhood and out-of-town. Ready.gov's Ready Kids page adds that the places should be safe, familiar and accessible, and that households with pets or service animals should think about animal-friendly locations.

Write a sentence of instructions for each place, not just a name. "The church parking lot on Oak Street, wait by the north door until 6 PM" is something a frightened child or a tired grandparent can follow. "The church" is not.

Write it down and put copies where people will be

A plan that lives only in one parent's head, or only in one phone, fails the first time that person is unreachable or that phone is dead. The Red Cross says everyone should carry emergency contact information in writing and saved on their cell phones, and that places where children spend time, such as school or daycare, should have the numbers too.

The Ready Kids page suggests keeping copies somewhere safe that goes with each person, like a backpack, a wallet, or taped inside a notebook. Its printable plan for parents lists a purse or briefcase, the car, the office and the disaster kit, and asks you to look the plan over every year.

Ready.gov's online form is a quick way to produce the document. It asks for household information; each family member's mobile number, other numbers or social media, email and important medical information; and the schools, childcare, caregivers and workplaces in your life, with their emergency or hotline numbers and pick-up plans. Ready.gov states that the information you type into the form is not saved, stored or shared by any government agency, and you can email the finished plan to yourself as a PDF.

Plan for the people who are not at home

Most plans quietly assume everyone is in the same house. The Red Cross asks families to account for members who live elsewhere for part of the year, such as service members on deployment, students away at college, or people who travel often, and to decide what changes when they are home and when they are away.

Ready.gov's list of household needs is a useful checklist here: different ages, responsibilities for helping others, places visited often, medical needs and equipment, disabilities and access needs, languages spoken, pets and service animals, and school-aged children. An aging parent who lives alone two states away belongs in your plan as much as the kids down the hall.

Also settle how each person will get alerts. Ready.gov explains that Wireless Emergency Alerts need no subscription, are free to receive, and are not affected by network congestion. Some phones need the alerts switched on, and some carriers label them Government Alerts or Emergency Alert Messages, so check every phone in the family.

Practice, update, and the common mistakes

Step four on Ready.gov is simply to practice the plan with your household, and the Ready Kids page recommends regular household meetings to review it. The Red Cross suggests practicing evacuation twice a year: grab your kit as if it were real, drive the planned route, and mark alternate routes in case roads are blocked.

Choosing a local contact. A neighbor or a cousin across town shares your outage. The point of the contact is distance. Keeping numbers only in phones. If the only copy of a number is in a phone, a dead battery takes it away, which is why both Ready.gov and the Red Cross call for paper copies. Forgetting the school. If the school or daycare does not have your out-of-town contact and pick-up plan, they cannot use them. Never testing it. The first run of any plan finds problems, so make sure it is not the real one.

Some families add an app for the check-in step itself. KinPing, for example, sends everyone a one-tap check-in when an official alert covers a family member's area and shows the answers on one family board. It is meant to sit next to a written plan and official alerts, not to replace either.

Frequently asked questions