Family Safety Plan: Communication

When it comes to disaster preparation, making plans with your family is one of the most important and fundamental steps that you can take a family is a team. And when it comes to teamwork during any critical incident, such as a disaster, the three CS always dominate our action, co ordination, communication and cooper operation and the coordinations, the plan. And the first part of the plan for dealing with disaster is actually going to be communication. Our second seat when we think about communicating with our family members, of course, we think about cell phones probably as the most common useful item that we can deal with relaying messages, finding out where people are giving updates, giving instructions, getting instructions from other family members today when everything works. But in our disaster preparation, when we think about the fact that the infrastructure might break down, we think about that people might lose their cell phones in the rush to go to a place or to get away from a place. We think about things that can be damaged. Cell phones themselves are actually pretty fragile and of course, we need to keep them charged and the infrastructure that actually supports the use of cell phones has also proven to be fragile. We know that during disasters if for no other reason than the fact that a lot of people are going to be trying to use the cell phone networks, the cell phone networks have failed and might fail when you need it most. So we need to have some other plans. We need to think about what are we gonna do if our cell phone isn't charged isn't available, isn't working is lost or if the whole network is down and we need to communicate with our families. It's real easy to say, call me if something happens. But if you can't make that call, we're gonna have to have a plan B or even further, the internet has proven to be a much better way of communicating in the middle of a disaster, even from some of the most remote parts of the world in the middle of these situations. When we think about the internet, you might be thinking about email. And again, you might be thinking about the fact that your email comes right to your cell phone. Well, again, we can find other ways to use the internet to give messages to other people or to communicate with our family. One of the best things you can do is have an internet based email system so that you can use it from any internet access, whether it's your phone, someone else's phone public library, any kind of internet kiosk in a hotel, wherever you can make it maybe out of the area of the disaster area. If you can get to a web based email system that doesn't require your laptop, your cell phone or your work based computer server to actually get to your messages, to get to your contacts and to be able to read messages that come into you. You're probably going to find yourself much better prepared for dealing with the use of email during a disaster, especially when you have to be on the move. You can also use public forums, forums that have servers that are kept in a different region from which you live are very unlikely to be affected by any localized disaster. So if you can get to internet access, you can get to a public forum, maybe send a private message to your family members that are also members there at the forum could be a great way to communicate. The fact is it doesn't have to be any type of forum that you're even familiar with or that you care about using, except that all of your families have an account there. You can communicate with each other and you know each other's names on those forums when you think about going to a forum. And of course, the personal defense network.com forum would be a great place to do this. You also might find the ability to communicate with other people. In your region or who are suffering from the same disaster so that you can work together to try to solve any problems that you may be having. The internet can be a great means of communication with your family or anyone else in the midst of that disaster. When your normal, more convenient means such as cell phones have failed. The next thing that you're gonna wanna deal with is the idea that you may need to use an intermediary to relay information. Now, while that internet forum may serve as a kind of intermediary, I'm talking about actually relying on emergency personnel that are going into a disaster area. Maybe you've been cordoned off and you've been told that you can't go into a certain area because it's been evacuated, but they are gonna send emergency personnel into that area to look for family and friends or maybe your own loved ones that are inside of your house. They may be a great resource and they will probably set up some means of having families communicate with each other and relay messages. So you may be able to post a message at a disaster rally point where the emergency personnel are bringing people who are evacuated from an area. Maybe there'll be a message board in New York City after the 911 attacks. Of course, there were famous pictures of posters and notes put up all around the area of ground zero looking for people so that people could reunite a lot of those notes simply said I made it out. I'm going in this direction. Those types of relayed messages that are left at fixed points or left with emergency personnel can be a great way to communicate with family. Of course, in a lower level disaster, maybe a more personal disaster that just affects your home or your family for some reason or a very localized thing inside of a small community, you could of course post those informational messages with someone else. A third party that everyone in the family knows and this becomes part of your family plan. You know that you're going to go to the library and talk to the librarian that your family has worked with and known for years to relay messages to one another. If all other things fail, maybe it's gonna be a trusted friend that lives in your neighborhood or lives in an adjoining community. Maybe it's going to be the clerk at the convenience store at a corner of Smith and First street. You're gonna go in there, hand that clerk an envelope and it's gonna have a message in there for someone else in your family who knows that's where they're supposed to go. Is it a incredibly reliable means of communication? Maybe not in extreme emergencies if everything is falling apart. But if there's a smaller localized disaster that you're preparing for relayed messages, can be a great way to communicate with your family. Of course, physically meeting was the oldest way to relay messages and to communicate with people to actually look someone in the eye and tell them what's going on. Now, this is gonna tie into your evacuation routes and your evacuation or rendezvous plans with your family. But remember ultimately, you may actually have to go and find your family member to let them know what it is. You need to know having that physical message delivered right face to face. However, could also set you up for other means of communication. Should your initial plan A B and C fail? So when you are together with your family, when you're having that physical meeting, you're actually able to communicate once you split up, if for some reason, someone needs to go get supplies or you're gonna need to go find another family member, someone's going to uh get a vehicle or maybe you're even just in two separate vehicles and you know that you might get separated at that point, establishing your plan through your physical meeting for your other communication options is going to be really important. So you can say at that point, you go get what you need to get, I'm gonna get what I need to get, we'll meet at this place. But if we don't, here's how we're gonna communicate. Here's our extra communication plan for when that physical meeting is actually over. It's also important to realize that those paper messages that you leave in different places can be read by other people. So you might want to come up with a way to take care of those actual physical messages, whether they're printouts from a computer or physically pencil on paper or crayon on the back of a cardboard box, whatever it may be, you might want to think about having some codes built in those paper messages can be intercepted very easily. They can be read by other people. You wouldn't want to tell someone, for example, in the middle of an emergency, I've left $1000 cash inside of, you know, encyclopedia volume e at the public library and obviously anybody who reads that no can go get it having a code set up with your family ahead of time to actually indicate where you're going to be what you're leaving in certain places. Maybe what you need or what they're supposed to do can be a great way to use paper messages that could obviously be read by other people to keep the information flow between your family secure. Make sure that you're conveying the information you need to convey without compromising the value of that information because someone else can interfere with your family plan.