The household emergency plan nobody writes down

A household emergency plan is four decisions written on one sheet of paper. Almost nobody has made them, and nobody thinks clearly enough to invent them at two in the morning with the smoke alarm going.

Here are the four, and why each one is shaped the way it is.

Two meeting points, not one

The first is just outside the home: somewhere everybody can reach in seconds without going back inside for anything. The end of the drive. The lamp post. The tree across the road. It has to be describable to a five-year-old.

The second is outside the neighbourhood entirely, because you cannot always get back. If the street is closed and nobody is being let through, the first meeting point is on the wrong side of the tape. A relative's house, a library, a supermarket car park.

Then walk to both of them once, with everyone. A meeting point nobody has ever stood in is a line of text, not a plan.

One out-of-area contact

Pick one person well outside your local area whom everybody rings or messages to say where they are and that they are all right.

Two reasons. Local networks jam when a lot of people in one place all try at once, and a message out of the area often gets through when a call across the street will not. And it gives everybody one number to remember instead of five, so nobody is sitting waiting to hear from somebody who is already fine and simply cannot get a call through.

Ask them first. Tell them plainly what you are asking. Give them a copy of the plan.

Write down where the shut-offs are — and stop there

Record where the water stop-tap, the gas valve and the consumer unit are, and what tool is kept with each one. Recording the location is useful and safe.

Do not write instructions for operating them. Doing that wrong is dangerous, and the correct handling differs by country, by supply and by installation — the valve, the tool, whether you should touch it at all, and what has to happen before anything goes back on. That belongs with your own utility provider, in their words, for your own supply. If something smells or looks wrong, everybody goes outside first and the calls happen from there.

The bag, scaled to your actual household

Go-bag lists go stale because they are somebody else's household. The arithmetic is trivial once you write the basis down, so write the basis down.

Say the basis is three litres of drinking water per person per day and three ready-to-eat meals per person per day, and you are scaling to three days for two adults and two children. That is four people:

• Water: 4 × 3 days × 3 L = 36 litres.
• Ready-to-eat food, needing no cooking and no power: 4 × 3 × 3 = 36 meals.
• Toilet roll at one per four person-days: 4 × 3 = 12 person-days, so 3 rolls.
• Charged power banks at one per two people: 2.

Those per-person figures are a stated starting basis, not a standard and not anybody's official guidance. Print them beside the totals so the next person can disagree with the basis rather than the answer. And do not forget the tin opener that needs no power — it is the most reliably forgotten item on any list of this kind.

Paper cards, for the people without a phone

The people who need a written card most are the ones without a working handset: children, anyone whose battery is flat, anyone who could not get to their phone. A number stored only in a phone is a number you do not have the moment the phone is gone, and hardly anybody can recite one from memory now.

One wallet-sized card per person, with the home address written on by hand. A child who can hand somebody a card does not have to remember anything at all.

The sheet

The Household Emergency Plan & Go-Bag prints all of it: the plan, a pocket contact card per person, a go-bag checklist scaled from the household you describe, a document checklist, and a review-date line you fill in yourself because the tool has no clock. Tie the review to something you cannot forget — a birthday, a clock change, the start of a school year.

It names no agency, no programme and no emergency telephone number, because those differ by country and change, and a wrong number on a card a child is carrying is worse than a blank one. You write those in from a source you trust, and you check them on the review date.