PrepPost: Creating a family reunification and communication plan

We spend a lot of our time not at home. Whether we’re at work, school, running errands, or attending social or sporting events, there’s a good chance an emergency will happen when we’re not at home or with our entire family. You need a plan for how and where you will meet up with your family if a disaster happens while you’re not together.

There are three parts to a reunification plan:

Creating the plan

• Agree on a meeting place. Pick somewhere, like a specific statue, or a playground, where all of your family members will meet after an emergency. You might be wondering “why can’t we just meet at home?” That can be your first meeting location, but having a backup somewhere else means everyone knows where to go if your home is impacted by or unsafe because of the emergency.
• Include pets in the plan. If you have animals at home, talk about who will bring them to the meeting place and what supplies you might need to help them come with you.
• Make a plan for picking up your children from school. Identify a relative or friend who can go when you are able to make it. Confirm with that person that they are willing/able. Tell the school the names and contact information of the people allowed to pick your child up. If you have children at multiple schools, you’ll need to plan for each of them.
• Include evacuation planning. If you cannot go back home because of the emergency, make a plan for who will bring your go bags and emergency supplies. Determine some places nearby you could go to as well, like a local relative’s home or a hotel.

Communication

• Know phone numbers. Everyone in your family should know everyone’s contact information. Nowadays, that information is often stored in our phones, but we need back-ups, like memorizing the number or having a card in our wallet with the information. Fill out a card for each of your children’s backpacks as well, and explain what they should do with it.
• Multiple modes of communication. Don’t just plan on cell phones for emergency communications. Pick two other ways you will communicate as a family that can be accessed without a phone, like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
• Out-of-town contact. Include the contact information for a family member or friend who lives in another town or state. Make sure everyone in your family knows to contact this person if they aren’t able to contact anyone locally. In some emergencies, a call or text is more likely to go through if it’s being sent out of the area than locally. Make sure your out-of-area contact knows what to do when the family starts messaging them.

Practice

• Talk about the plan regularly. Plans are only useful if everyone remembers them and what to do. Talk about your meeting location, your communication cards, and your out of state contacts at dinner several times a year. If an emergency happens somewhere else in the state/country, you can use that opportunity to talk to your family about what you would do if it happened here.
• Includes your kids in practice. Ask them to recite phone numbers or to look at comms cards and read the number. Have them point out the community meeting place when you’re driving around do they can recognize the spot.
• Practice getting your pet out of the house. This will help your pet be comfortable leaving the house and will help you practice getting them into whatever crate/harness is needed to help them leave. For an extra level of practice, do this while the fire alarm is going off because that adds some noise and stress that could be happening during a real emergency.