Develop home emergency plan
7e.
Develop an emergency action plan for your home that includes what to do in case of fire, storm, power outage, and water outage.
A plan you make calmly, before an emergency, beats decisions made in the middle of one. This requirement asks you to actually develop that plan for your own home — write it out and keep it somewhere your family can find it, not just think through it once.
Four Situations, One Plan
Your plan needs a clear answer for each of these:
- Fire: two escape routes from every room, a family meeting point outside, and confirmation that smoke alarms work.
- Storm: where to shelter for your area’s most likely severe weather (tornado, hurricane, severe thunderstorm), and how your family gets warnings.
- Power outage: how you’ll get light and stay warm or cool, what happens to food in the fridge and freezer, and how you’ll stay in contact if cell towers are overloaded.
- Water outage: where you’ll get drinking water and how much you have stored (see requirement 7f for how to make questionable water safe to drink).
What Your Plan Should Cover
For each of the four emergencies
- A specific action for each family member, not just a general idea of what “should” happen.
- An outside meeting point everyone knows, for a fire or evacuation.
- An out-of-area contact person everyone can reach if local phone lines are jammed.
- Where emergency supplies (flashlights, water, a battery radio) are kept, and that everyone knows where that is.
Making the Plan Real
Write your plan down and walk through it with your family — a plan that exists only in your head doesn’t help anyone else in the house. Practice the parts that benefit from practice, like a fire escape route, the same way your troop practices skills instead of just reading about them.