Planning is Important
During an emergency, your first priority is to ensure the safety of your family and your ability to weather the storm. That is why every emergency plan starts with your family plan: what emergencies you want to prepare for and how you will respond to each.
But there is a second priority that is closely tied to your family’s well-being: your neighborhood. The welfare of your family is closely tied to that of everyone else who is impacted by a natural disaster or other crisis. That is why
it’s essential that, after developing a family emergency plan you start working on a neighborhood plan.
Start with a discussion
Yes, that means talking to the neighbors. The prospect of a disaster is not a topic that we normally talk to our neighbors about, but it really should be. This post will give you some ideas of how to approach this topic.
After you’ve broached the topic, it’s time to encourage and work with your neighbors to create a neighborhood plan.
These five steps will help you develop an emergency response plan for your neighborhood:
Step One: Indentify Your Community
Start by identifying your community. How much of an area can you reasonably organize? This might be your apartment building or just a handful of houses that are closest to you. Or you may include a couple of the blocks nearest your house. If you don’t already know these people well, now is the time to start establishing a relationship with them.
Step Two: Build a Team
Next, you’ll want to build a team. Who are the people in your neighborhood that you can work cooperatively with? These are neighbors who will work together to create a plan and who will, in a time of emergency, provide support and leadership.
Step Three:
Map Your Neighborhood
The third step is to map your neighborhood. This means talking to each household and finding out what your risks and resources are. Do you have neighbors with special or useful skills? This would be those trained in first aid or other medical care, construction trades, law enforcement or other first responders.
After you’ve made a systematic list of all the resources that you’ll be able to draw upon from neighbors, the next part of the equation is the negative side, the risks and vulnerabilities in your neighborhood.
The risks that you’ll want to assess will include people of special concern: the elderly, those with very young children, those with health issues or neighbors with disabilities. Also, look for environmental risks. Maybe there are houses that are close to power lines or a river or other source of danger.
Step Four: Identify Threats and Create a Plan
The fourth step is to identify the potential threats you want to prepare for. Start with the events that have impacted your community in recent years. This will include any natural disasters that are common to your area: tornadoes, floods or severe storms. Don’t forget health and social crises: pandemics or riots.
Once you have this list of potential threats, you need to start prioritizing them. Which ones are most likely to occur and what kind of an impact will it have on your neighborhood? Don’t spend too much energy on disasters that are unlikely to impact your neighborhood. A meteor strike is (theorhetically) always a possibility but how likely is it to occur?
Now, here is the important part: you need to develop a plan of action. Your plan needs to include:
Disaster awareness: How will you stay aware of imminent threats?
Communication: How will you communicate important information to the rest of the neighborhood?
Need for evacuation: How will you decide if you should evacuate or stay in place? How will you help elderly, disabled or vulnerable neighbors to safely evacuate?
The three-day plan: Most local governments are able to respond to disasters within a few hours. But what if the disaster is so impactful or widespread that help is delayed? What will you do for each other to make sure everyone is safe until help can arrive?
You might want to use the Three-day Family Plan booklet as a template to develop your neighborhood plan or use one of the templates listed in the links to resources at the bottom of this post.
Once you develop your plan, you need to put it in writing and make sure that everyone in the neighborhood has a copy and understands the importance of being familiar with the plan.
Step Five: Do a Practice Drill
Finally, you need to do a practice drill. Start with a table-top drill with just the neighborhood leadership group. When you think you’ve ironed out all the details (in theory), it’s time to do a drill.
This is similar to the fire drills that you do at school or work. The purpose is to help everyone learn their role in responding to a crisis and to forestall the confusion and panic that often accompany a real disaster.
A drill will help all the neighbors see the importance of the planning that you’ve been doing. They will likely become more engaged and want to contribute to ensure a more successful neighborhood emergency plan.
It will take a bit of planning and cooperation from everyone. You’ll want to read the resources listed at the bottom of this post for ideas on how to do a drill. You might want to enlist people from outside the neighborhood to help you execute the drill. Afterwards they can help you assess how well you did. You can make the drill a fun neighborhood event, with a potluck or an “after-the-mock-disaster” block party.
Follow-Up
After the drill, you’ll want to evaluate how well it went. Identify the reason(s) for any failures. Ask neighbors to help you assess how well (or not) everyone performed. They’ll likely see holes in the plan that you hadn’t considered.
Look for signs of inadequate planning, poor communication or other factors you weren’t aware of. Iron out these wrinkles by revising or updating your plan. Send out the updated plan to all the neighbors.
A well-thought-out plan can help ensure that everyone you care about is equipped to weather a crisis. If you follow these five steps, you will build trust and allegiance among your neighbors and help create a neighborhood that is resliient, cohesive and prepared to respond to a disaster.
Additional resources
Here are two websites that have lots of great information, including templates for planning and checklists to make sure your plan is complete:
Washington State Neighborhood Preparedness
Bainbridge, WA Map Your Neighborhood Tool Kit
Most of the statistics cited in this post come from FEMA’s 2023 National Household Survey. You can download it here for an informative and interesting read.
