Preparedness at Home: Building Family Resilience and Readiness
Mountainside in National Forest
The middle of August 2023 finds emergency responders nationwide stretched to the breaking point. While thousands of wildland fire crews are deployed to major fires across the south and western United States, FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams are on the ground in Maui scouring the remains of a beautiful Hawaiian town ravaged by a wind-fed firestorm just 10 days ago. Many of those responders left their homes and families to do the difficult work and are now watching as new threats pose a risk to their own communities. With Hurricane Hilary bearing down on the California coast, wildfires across the Pacific Northwest, Texas, and California, and flooding threats throughout the western states, many of our nation’s most skilled responders are unable to use their own knowledge, skills, and expertise to take care of the communities they call home, and the people they call neighbors, friends, and family.
Whether drawn by the satisfaction of humble service, or the surge of adrenaline during response to incidents and disasters, first responders are known to run toward a problem while others flee. However, workforce shortages, increased operational deployments, and more frequent incidents increasingly require many first responders to leave friends and family to fend for themselves when disaster turns and threatens their own community.
The Prepared Family
When we leave home, do our families have the resources needed to respond to a local emergency or crisis at home? It may be as simple as keeping a small reserve of cash for unexpected expenses or ensuring that everyone in the family knows how to shut off the water, or the gas. In more significant emergencies, it may be necessary to evacuate an oncoming flood or wildfire or hunker down and wait out the winds of a passing tropical storm or the blowing snow from a winter storm. When the first responder in the family is tending to other people’s call for help, is their family prepared to weather a potential storm in their absence?
Often, we try to spare our loved ones the burden of thinking about these difficult times and assume that the family will be together when disaster strikes. That may not be the case while any member of the family is working a typical shift, or deployed on a disaster, or just gone shopping and leaving the older children home alone. Do our children know what to do when the power goes out? Can they start a fire in the wood stove? What would they do if a wildfire started near our home? In these situations, prior planning and communication is critical to saving lives … our family’s lives.Insufficient Access to Advanced Medical Care
While rural EMS teams are dedicated and well-trained, their resources are often inadequate compared to their urban counterparts. Vital medical equipment and essential medications are scarce, forcing EMS personnel to improvise under life-threatening circumstances. The lack of specialized care options further exacerbates the peril faced by patients in remote areas.
The Family Preparedness Series
The internet is full of experts in preparedness, ranging from government officials with simplified tools to prepare communities for disaster to survival experts teaching people how to live off the land indefinitely. We are not survival experts by any means, but we are a small community of dedicated first responders who have had to leave our families for prolonged periods of time to answer our calling. Whether leaving a spouse and a young child at home to staff fire department resources during a hurricane, to deploying for two weeks as a member of an urban search and rescue team, to leaving for over a year on a combat deployment, our team hopes to share some hard learned lessons about preparing our families for what might happen when we’re gone.
Building strong, confident, and resilient families allows first responders to focus their attention on the job at hand when called to action. Exploring the topics discussed in this series, and sharing them with neighbors, friends, and families makes our communities more prepared, and capable to protect life and property during an emergency, whether we are present or not.
Components of the Series
In the coming weeks, we will explore some preparedness concepts to discuss with our family and friends, and ways to implement some of these concepts to prepare our family and community to respond to an emergency or disaster. Some of the concepts covered include:
Understanding Risk and Threats in our Area
Every community has unique risks and threats that we need to consider when building a family plan. The family in Key West, Florida probably doesn’t need to worry about heavy snowfall, and the family in Wyoming can skip the preparation for hurricane season. Understanding what types of emergencies are most prevalent, how they might impact your home and community, and what plans currently exist in your community to address those types of emergencies are a great place to start.
As we discuss planning and emergency supplies, each of these different scenarios may require unique preparedness or response activities. Planning that includes the risks and threats that we are vulnerable to in our area will aid in decision-making, driving plans for reuniting with our loved ones as we mitigate and respond to those types of incidents.
This segment will address sources of local threat and risk data, methods of analyzing the actual risk, as well as the likelihood and severity of such an incident impacting the community. It serves as a foundation for family planning, ensuring that we prioritize the most appropriate preparation for the most likely and most impactful emergencies.
Communication and Information Gathering
There are so many resources available online, on our phones, and in our communities to gather information about dangerous weather, current events, or pending evacuations. Does everyone in your home have access to that information? By sheltering our families from the flow of emergency information, we limit their ability to assess their situation and respond to an evolving incident. Instead, ensuring that all family members have access to this type of information (as appropriate) allows the family to make decisions from the same set of information, and utilize plans and resources more effectively.
In this segment, we will provide a number of helpful resources for communication and information sharing, including those that may be available without access to internet or cellular data. The list is by no means exhaustive but should provide a foundation for building a strong communication plan for your family and community.
Accessing Important Documents
Keeping family documents secure is important. Birth certificates, passports, marriage certificates, insurance information, and banking information should all be safeguarded on a daily basis. Many people keep those types of documents locked in a safe. Who has the combination? Who knows how to access those documents? What if something were to happen to us, can your family access these important documents? What if your family needs to evacuate? Do they know where these documents are and how to get a hold of them?
This segment describes methods to ensure optimal security while maintaining ready access during an emergency. We will discuss what types of information should be compiled and kept as part of the family’s important document file.
Building a Family Plan
What do we do when an emergency happens? How does the family react to an evolving incident in our community? Where do we evacuate to? How do we get there? What do we bring with us? The family needs a plan, not the kind of plan that is printed in a binder and left on a shelf in an office, but a realistic sequence of events. Every member of the family should know what to do and what every other member of the family will be doing. That is the basis of the plan.
Our team explores the basic development of a concise and actionable emergency plan that every member of the family can implement. In this segment, we describe what should be included in the family emergency plan, and how to share it among the family, and ensure that every member of the family is ready to do their part when disaster strikes.
Preparedness Stuff
When people think of emergency preparedness and family readiness, this is often the first thing we talk about… do we have a generator? There are hundreds, if not thousands of YouTube videos about “Bug-Out Bags” and “Get Home Bags”, coaching us to purchase preparedness items to ensure our survival in times of disaster. The stuff we choose to purchase will likely be dictated by our environment, the region we live in, and the risks and threats identified earlier in this process. The stuff we purchase should help our family implement our emergency plan, not supersede the need for a plan. This segment was intentionally placed after the development of a family emergency plan so that we can make sure that our equipment and supplies aligns with what our family intends to do.
In this segment, we will discuss some equipment and supply basics, and explore some basic ideas around not only obtaining emergency supplies, but making sure they are accessible, and maintained in an optimal state of readiness. We will also discuss ways to make sure that all appropriate members of the family know how to use this equipment, and how this stuff factors in to the family emergency plan.
Decision-Making and Exercising our Plans
We’ve got a plan, and we have some stuff… now what? How do ensure alignment among the family regarding decision-making in the moments leading up to an emergency, or after the incident has occurred. In order for the family emergency plan to be effective, everyone should trust that everyone will act in a predictable and reliable manner based on the plan, and that family members communicated their actions to each other.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is to exercise the family emergency plan. Taking the time to review expected actions of each family member in specific scenarios will increase the confidence of all members of the family and improve understanding of the overall plan. When possible, drilling specific components in a no-risk environment also increases the confidence of family members in each other’s capability and the integrity of the plan developed together.
In this segment, we provide some helpful examples of training, exercise, and testing of the family emergency plan, short of blaring an air horn at 4:00am and hosting an emergency drill. This segment is intended to be the culmination of the series and ensure that families are ready to put the plan into action, if needed, and react with confidence during an emergency or disaster.
What’s Next?
The Bison Six team will release new segments of this series each week, building on the concepts discussed in previous segments, to drive discussions about preparedness in our community. As first responders, we are confident in the ability of our teams to carry out emergency response as part of our daily duties, and we recognize that the team is only as strong as the weakest link. This series is intended to improve the readiness of our families and communities to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disaster … so that we can continue to deploy with confidence to help others in need knowing that our families are prepared, ready, and resilient.
