If disaster strikes, how will you be able to communicate with your spouse or child if their phone is down?  Establish a family communications plan.

Establish one outside family member or friend who does not live in the local area to be the point of contact for your family.  If all of your family knows to call Aunt Mary in Tucson if they can’t reach you, Aunt Mary can be the one person they can reach to get word that you are ok and where everyone is.  She becomes the go-between of information.  You can’t reach anyone at the school to find out if the kids are ok, but the kids were able to use another phone to call Aunt Mary.  Aunt Mary lives out of the local area so she should not be affected by the disaster.  This is very important.  Write Aunt Mary’s phone number down and put it in the kids’ backpack.

What if all communications are down?  Plan a meeting place that you all can get to.  Your home is usually the one place everyone knows to go, but what if it is destroyed or not accessible?  Establish an alternative meeting place away from buildings and other hazards.  Maybe meet at a park, parking lot, or some other place that may be accessible and not hazardous.

There are no 100% correct answers in emergency planning, but having a plan and communicating it with your family will give you a leg up if disaster strikes.

With modern conveniences such as electricity and technology, we have become accustomed to a standard of living in which lights, water, and food are always available at our fingertips. We have also come to expect that if we have an emergency, the paramedics, fire trucks, and police are just minutes away and ready to come to our rescue. All of these are essential to life and survival, but can you really expect them during a major emergency or disaster? The answer is quite simply…no.

No matter where we live, we are susceptible to some type of disaster. Floods, earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis, fires, major storms, viral outbreaks, or other disasters/major emergencies are a part of our lives and something we don’t usually think about until it happens.

This site is a guide that provides the emergency essentials from a voice of experience. What I will also bring you that no other site seems to address is what really happens after the disaster. I will give you an understanding of the process of recovery, where help comes from and when.

I have 25 years of experience in coordinating emergency/disaster response, both in the military and the local county sector. In my years of working in emergency services, I have experienced the full cycle of working with and talking to rescuers and victims from the start of the emergency through to the end, when the clean up and rebuilding begins.

When disaster strikes, emergency responders in your area are going to be overwhelmed. Your call for help will be added to the possibly hundreds or thousands already on the list, which is precisely why you need to be prepared to take care of yourself as best you can. Experts say be prepared to take care of yourself for 72 hours and to have a 72-hour kit of emergency essentials to sustain you and your family until help arrives. From my experience, that is a very realistic statement.

I have talked with victims afterward who said, “This property has never flooded before, I never thought this would happen.” All of their stories made me a believer that disasters can happen anytime and anywhere. Within The Emergency Essentials Guide, I will bring you practical information to help with your family’s safety by providing you insight to the different types of emergencies and disasters while providing a guide to the emergency essentials that will help you and your family be prepared to respond if such an event were to occur.

The Emergency Essentials Guide will take you through the process from preparation to response, what you should do and expect in the aftermath, and what you can expect from emergency services during and after a major emergency or disaster.

No emergency or disaster is the same. This site is not intended to guarantee your safety by following all ideas implicitly, but merely to help you think and prepare so that you are a little better able to respond and get you and your family to safety. The Home Emergency Plan is a good place for you to start.

Please take time to review the steps you can take to prepare you and your family. There won’t be time for it during a disaster.

This site is still very new and I will be adding pages as they are completed. Many of the pages will include a comments area at the bottom. Please feel free to leave comments on whether the information was helpful.