In this weeks 's blog from Accuserve, we'll explain how to protect your home from the threat of wildfires through effective mitigation strategies. We'll also address how to prepare a family emergency preparedness plan and evacuation plan to ensure the safety of your family and property.

Making an Emergency Response Plan

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provides a free, guided worksheet on how to develop a home emergency plan. The general plan applies to all hazards, but you'll also need to make a detailed evacuation plan for any special natural hazards that occur regularly in your area, such as wildfires. You'll need to identify an evacuation route for each direction since a fire can start and spread in any direction.

Using FEMA's Template for a Personal Emergency Response Plan

Using FEMA's template, you can fill in the blanks of the prompts to create your family's emergency response plan. The template lets you add sections to address various natural hazards that frequently occur in your area. For example, if you reside in California, besides a wildfire response plan, you might want to add earthquake and wind danger response plans to your family's plan since those two hazards occur at least annually.

Identifying Alert Resources

FEMA also provides more advanced resources for businesses and other organizations, but you would still answer the same essential questions to get started. Those questions include where you will obtain your hazard alerts and weather information. The Internet remains glutted with weather apps, so you'll need to find the one that provides the most accurate information and offers alerts for the hazards common to your area. Concerning wildfires, some individuals might choose to set an alert in an app from their local TV news station or favorite weather app. Others might take the more direct approach, signing up for emails about fire danger from sources that run mathematical models like J.D. Carlson's fire danger model each day.

Planning Evacuation Routes

Apps like Google Maps and MapQuest make planning evacuation routes easy. Simply create a pin for your home on the map, then choose a safe space in each direction you want to travel if you need to evacuate. Many people miss the notion of needing to know where you're going when you evacuate, so for each cardinal direction, choose a destination.  

Map the trip from your home to the destination. Some of these may default to convoluted routes that would move you in a different direction first, but using either app, you can click on the route and move it to another road. Do this to build a safe route out of town in each direction. Neither app will let you move the route to a one-way street or closed road so that you can pre-plan evacuation routes quickly and easily. Lastly keep in mind alternate routes that seem out of the way as the apps may not account for closed roads and detours.  

What do you do when one direction faces water? Plan to evacuate by boat. If you reside on the coast or inland body of water, your safest evacuation route might be water-based. Instead of purchasing a boat if you don't already own one, plan to evacuate with a neighbor. Make a backup plan with another neighbor, just in case.  

Making Home Safety a Priority

Keep visiting the Accuserve blog because, during the next few months, we'll also consider how to plan for home safety in various situations, from catastrophic weather events like hurricanes to flood preparedness. We'll help you plan for tornado safety and help you keep your pets safe, too. Keep reading our blog to learn how to keep your family, pets, and personal belongings safer.

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