Communication & strategy

The family contact plan

Build it in My Plan, print a wallet card for every person, and drill the kids on it. The pieces:

1. The out-of-area contact. Choose a relative or close friend in another city or country. When local networks jam, calls out of the area often connect while local calls fail — so everyone separated reports to this one person: "I'm safe, I'm at X, heading to Y." The contact keeps the tally and relays. This single arrangement reunites more families than any technology.
2. Everyone knows the numbers by heart: each adult's mobile and the out-of-area contact — memorized, not just stored. Children learn two numbers like times tables. Paper copies in every wallet, school bag, and go-bag, because dead phones keep secrets.
3. The check-in rule: in any emergency, everyone sends one short message the moment they are somewhere stable — "SAFE, at school, staying" — to the family group and the out-of-area contact. Then stop transmitting. Everyone knows: no news for hours means busy lines, not tragedy. Agreeing this in advance prevents the worst hours of panic.
4. Meeting points (the physical backstop when nothing electronic works): the three-point ladder — outside home, in the neighborhood, out of area — with waiting times and written-note rules, detailed in rendezvous plans.
5. Rally times: if all communication is down, the standing rule is "go to the highest reachable meeting point and wait for the top of each hour" — a family that shares a clock convention finds itself.

Phones in a crisis

• Text, don't call. SMS uses a sliver of network capacity and queues for delivery through congestion that drops every call. One text per update. Calls are for emergencies-within-the-emergency.
• Battery is life expectancy: low-power mode immediately, screen dim, one news check per hour rather than doomscrolling (which burns battery and nerves together), airplane mode in dead-signal zones (signal-searching drains fastest of all), charge opportunistically from car and power banks. A phone nursed this way lasts days.
• When your network is down, others may stand: a family member's phone on a different carrier is real redundancy. Wi-Fi calling and messaging apps sometimes live while the cellular network is jammed, and vice versa — try both paths before concluding "no contact".
• Weak-signal tricks: high ground, upper floors, near windows; hold still while sending; SMS retries automatically — write it, send it, pocket the phone and let it work.
• Satellite SOS: recent iPhones and some Androids can text emergency services or contacts by satellite with no network at all. Find out today whether your phones have it and try the demo mode — discovering it exists is not a during-the-disaster task.
• Keep one old phone alive: yesterday's phone, charged monthly and kept with the go-bag with its charger, is a spare screen, torch, offline-map reader, and — with any SIM — an emergency dialer (emergency numbers work on any network's coverage).

Offline maps — prepare them today

1. Download your region now, while the internet works: in Google Maps — profile picture → "Offline maps" → "Select your own map" → zoom the rectangle over your city and the routes to your out-of-area destinations → Download. Organic Maps and OsmAnd are excellent app alternatives whose entire purpose is offline use.
2. Cover: home city in detail, plus the corridors to every evacuation destination in your plan, plus desert/camping areas you frequent.
3. Re-download when the app warns of expiry (Google's offline areas expire after months without update). Put a twice-yearly reminder with your go-bag checks.
4. GPS positioning works without any network — satellites don't care that the towers are down. Offline map + GPS dot = full navigation with zero signal. What you lose is live traffic and search freshness, nothing more.
5. Paper is the deep backup: one city map and one country/region map in the car and grab-folder. Mark home, the meeting points, hospitals, and your evacuation routes on it in pen. Paper needs no battery, survives water in a zip-lock, and lets a whole group plan around a bonnet. Compass-and-map basics live in navigation.
6. Print the small maps that matter: the walking route to each meeting point, the neighborhood with shut-off points marked. Tape one inside the go-bag lid.

Radio basics

Receiving — your information lifeline

1. A battery or hand-crank AM/FM radio is the single most reliable crisis information tool. Broadcast transmitters have generators and reach everyone; they outlive mobile networks in nearly every disaster. Every home kit and go-bag gets one.
2. Tonight's homework: scan the dial, find your area's main news stations, and write the frequencies into My Plan and on tape on the radio itself. Searching a dial during an emergency wastes battery and calm.
3. AM and shortwave travel enormously farther than FM — at night especially, AM brings regional and international broadcasters when local FM is silent or compromised. A radio with shortwave adds the BBC World Service class of sources for a few dinars more.
4. Listening discipline: radios on schedule, not continuously — top of each hour for bulletins — saves batteries and sanity. One person listens, notes the essentials in the family logbook, briefs the rest.
5. Your car is a radio with a giant battery. In a home blackout, news hour in the car (parked outside, never in a closed garage) also charges phones.

Transmitting — family two-way radios

• License-free walkie-talkies (PMR446 class) are cheap, legal for personal use in most countries, and cover roughly 0.5–2 km in town, more with line of sight — genuinely useful between floors of a building, a convoy of two cars, home and the nearby shop, or around a campsite.
• Agree the family channel (and a backup channel) in advance and label it on each radio. Keep messages short and boring; anyone can listen — radios have no privacy. Names, not addresses; "meet at point two", not the address itself.
• Radio voice procedure that actually matters: think before pressing, press then pause a beat, speak slowly, say who you're calling then who you are, "over" when expecting reply. Confirm you were understood; assume nothing sent is heard.
• Longer-range amateur (ham) radio is a licensed hobby worth exploring in calm times if this interests you — in disasters, licensed amateurs traditionally pass emergency traffic when everything else is down.

Verifying rumors & news during a crisis

In every disaster, false information travels faster than the emergency itself — "the dam has failed", "they're evacuating the city", "this cures it" — and it kills by triggering panicked movement, wrong medicine, and mistrust of real warnings. Treat information hygiene like hand hygiene.

The 60-second check before believing or forwarding — SIFT

1. Stop. Strong emotion — fear, outrage, hope — is the signature of manipulation. The more urgently a message says "share now", the more suspicion it has earned. Real warnings want you to act; fakes want you to spread.
2. Investigate the source. Who actually said this? A named authority (civil defence, ministry, known broadcaster) on its own channel — or "a friend's cousin who works there", a screenshot with no origin, a video with no date? Anonymous provenance = rumor, whatever it shows.
3. Find better coverage. Is any established outlet or official channel carrying it? Real, major events appear on multiple independent sources within the hour. One viral post alone carrying enormous news is its own refutation.
4. Trace to the original. Old footage relabeled as today's event is the commonest fake in wars and disasters. Check dates; look for details that don't match your place (signage, weather, vehicles).

The family rules

• Choose your official channels now — civil defence, government emergency accounts, one or two established broadcasters — and write them in My Plan. During events, they outrank everything on the family group chat, including relatives with confident voices.
• Act on warnings, verify explanations. A siren or official evacuation order gets obeyed first and analyzed later; a viral voice-note explaining "what's really happening" gets verified first, always.
• Forward nothing unverified. Make it the family's iron rule, including for adults. Every unverified forward makes your family part of the disaster.
• Beware precision panic: fake messages love specific times and place names ("they close the bridge at 6"). Specificity is not evidence; sourcing is.
• Life-critical claims get the highest bar: anything about medicines, water safety, "safe routes", or all-clears must come from official channels — these are exactly the messages that hostile actors and fools counterfeit.
• Keep a written log during long events: what was announced, by whom, when. Memory under stress is a rumor mill of its own.

Stay or evacuate — the decision framework

Sheltering in place with two weeks of supplies is usually safer than joining a highway of unprepared cars — until it isn't. The skill is deciding with pre-agreed triggers rather than in the panic of the moment, and deciding early: every option narrows as a crisis matures.

Decide now, while calm

1. Write your triggers in My Plan. Leave when ANY fires: an official evacuation order for your area · fire/flood/fighting closer than your named distance line · home becomes unsafe (structural damage, no water for 48h in heat, unbreathable air) · a medical need you cannot meet at home · your two-week supplies pass half-used with no improvement in sight.
2. Name the destinations: primary and backup (a relative's home, a named town), with two routes to each, marked on the paper map. "Away" is not a destination.
3. Prepare the go-decision to be cheap: go-bags standing ready, documents in the grab-folder, car half-full always. When leaving costs 10 minutes, you can afford to leave early — which is the whole game.

Deciding on the day

1. An official evacuation order for your area ends the debate: go, by the announced routes.
2. Otherwise score the table honestly with both adults. Tie or genuine doubt while a threat approaches → go early. The regretted evacuations are late ones; almost no one regrets leaving a day too soon.
3. Once decided, commit fully. Half-evacuating — leaving late, returning for belongings, splitting the family across the decision — is the worst of both worlds.

Executing the departure

1. Tell the out-of-area contact: destination, route, departure time, expected arrival. Check in on arrival.
2. Load: people → documents folder → go-bags → water → medicines → power/radio → then comfort items as space allows. In that order, so a hurried loading still takes what matters.
3. House: electricity off at the main, gas off, water off, windows and doors locked, a note only if pre-agreed with neighbors (nothing on the door advertising emptiness), one exterior light on.
4. Drive: main announced routes even if slower — shortcuts through unknown areas during crises are how families meet the hazard. Fuel at the first easy opportunity, never below half.
5. If conditions collapse en route (night, fighting, storm), stop early at any defensible waypoint — a relative, a mosque, a public shelter — update the contact, continue in daylight. Arriving late beats not arriving.
6. Register with authorities/relief at the destination if displacement looks long — registration is how aid and family tracing find you.