The scariest part of a storm isn’t the wind. It’s not knowing where your people are. The lights go out, your phone shows one bar that never resolves, and suddenly the most ordinary question becomes hard: How do we reach each other?
Most families treat this as a problem to solve in the moment. That’s why it goes badly. When your nerves are up, your brain is down. You need a plan you make when you’re calm, with steps so simple you can follow them when you’re not. If you have kids, you already know how this works. Fire drills aren’t dramatic. They’re boring on purpose. The point is to remove decisions when decisions are most expensive.
A family emergency communications plan sounds grand, like a binder you’ll never open. It’s not. It’s a single page and a couple of small habits. The single page answers three questions:
That’s it. If you write nothing else, write that. “Who, where, when.” Put those words at the top of a sheet of paper and fill in the answers. Put the page on the fridge. Take a picture of it. Put a card with the same answers in each wallet and backpack. Make it so trivial you can hand it to a sitter and feel confident.
When you think about communication in emergencies, it’s tempting to imagine some clever app that magically stays up when everything else goes down. Don’t. Start with old ideas that have been tested: a hub, a physical place, and a time limit.
The hub is an out-of-area contact. Pick someone who lives far enough away that local problems won’t affect them. In many disasters, long-distance lines are less jammed than local ones. Make this person the switchboard. Everyone in your family texts them first, and they relay. This is not fancy. It works.
The physical place is a meeting spot. You need two: one near home, and one out of the neighborhood. The near one should be obvious and outside. “The big oak across the street.” The far one should be somewhere you could reach even if your street is closed: a relative’s house, or a library, or a faith center across town. Write both down in plain language. If you have kids, go stand in these spots once so they can point to them on a map.
The time limit is a trigger. Decide in advance when you stop trying to reach each other by phone and switch to moving. “If I can’t get anyone in 10 minutes, I go to the near spot.” This rule sounds harsh till you try it in your head. Which is worse: three people all calling and redialing and draining batteries in a kind of emotional DDoS, or three people walking to a place they’ve all memorized? The latter is less romantic, but it’s how you get results.
You don’t need to chase news either. The United States has systems that push you the important stuff without your having to find it. The alerts you’ve seen for amber alerts and severe weather are called Wireless Emergency Alerts. They’re built into most phones. They’re short and location-based and sent by public safety officials through a federal system. Make sure they’re turned on in your phone settings. No app needed.
At home, add one piece of gear that behaves like a seatbelt: a NOAA Weather Radio. This is a small, cheap radio that listens to a continuous broadcast of weather and “all-hazards” alerts. It doesn’t care if the cell network is saturated. If you get one that supports SAME (Specific Area Message Encoding), you can program your county code so you’re not woken by alerts for places you don’t live. These radios are plugged into the same federal pipeline (it’s called IPAWS, if you like names) that feeds the phone alerts. The result is simple: important messages reach you whether your phone is quiet or not.
Most of the time, your phone will still be the main tool. But your phone behaves differently in an emergency. When networks are busy, voice calls often fail. Texts do better. They’re smaller and more tolerant of delay. The trick is to use them the same way the network does: lightly.
Text first. Keep it short. “We’re ok at home. Near spot. –Dad.” Don’t attach photos. If you must call, keep it under 30 seconds. If you have a landline, try it. If a text stalls, wait a minute. Try once more. Then switch channels. Email sometimes works when texting doesn’t, because it takes a different path. Don’t sit there hammering send; you become your own worst enemy.
Be kind to your battery. Turn on low power mode. Dim the screen. Close the apps that churn. Bluetooth is nice, but it’s optional. If you’ve ever watched your battery drop while you’re just waiting, you know it’s not just use that drains it, it’s anxiety. The more you fiddle, the faster it goes. Know where your power banks live. Keep a cable kit in a drawer and one in the car. Treat this like keeping the gas tank above a quarter before a big storm. Not heroic, just thoughtful.
There’s a temptation when you hear “radios” to imagine someone in a bunker surrounded by blinking gear. Ignore that picture. Radios are just another way to talk when the usual ones get noisy. And there are simple options.
FRS radios are the easiest. They’re the little “walkie-talkies” you can buy at a hardware store. No license. No setup. They won’t reach across a city, but they’ll reach across a neighborhood. If you need to coordinate with a caregiver a few blocks away, or keep track of a teen at a nearby park, FRS is fine. Teach everyone how to turn them on and pick a channel.
If you want more range and a bit more reliability, there’s GMRS. It requires an FCC license in the U.S., but one license usually covers your immediate family. GMRS can use repeaters in some areas, which are like megaphones for radio signals. If you go this route, read the rules and follow them. This is how you avoid being the person everyone on the air rolls their eyes at.
Then there’s amateur radio. This is both a hobby and a service. It has more options, more power, and a strong volunteer community. It also requires you to get a license and learn the basics. If that sounds fun, get the entry-level license. You can reach local repeaters and listen to emergency nets. But you don’t have to go this deep to be safer. Start with FRS. It’s the duct tape of radios.
The low-status stuff is what will save you. A page of phone numbers. A note about who gets called first. A copy of the plan on the fridge. Wallet cards for the kids. People skip these because they’re not impressive. That’s a mistake. The quality of a plan is how it behaves under stress, not how shiny it looks when no one is using it.
A wallet card is just a small piece of paper that answers a few questions quickly. Name and date of birth. Parent/guardian and phone. Out-of-area contact and phone. Address and city. Near-home spot. Out-of-neighborhood spot. Allergies or notes if relevant. That’s plenty. Write it by hand. Laminate it if you want. Take a picture and put it in the camera roll. If your kid can pull this card from a backpack and hand it to an adult, you’ve removed a hundred seconds of confusion.
Some people will read all this and say “We’ll do it this weekend.” That usually means never. You can do eighty percent of it tonight. Sit at the table. List the people in your household. List the people outside it who matter in a pinch: a sitter, a neighbor, a teacher, the school office, a pediatrician, a vet. Pick an out-of-area contact and text them to ask if they’re willing to be your relay. Pick two meeting spots. Write three triggers. Turn on the phone alerts. Put the weather radio in a central spot and program your county code. Make two wallet cards. Put the master page on the fridge. Take a photo. Done.
If you want to do a little more, run a five-minute drill. Send a test text to the out-of-area contact. Have the kids walk to the near-home spot and come back. Show everyone where the radio and power banks live. This will feel slightly silly. Good. “Slightly silly” is how you know you’re practicing at the right level.
Does this cover all the edge cases? No. But plans fail at the edges much less often than they fail at the center. If you make the center strong, the edges become easier to handle.
The most overlooked part of a plan is the people outside your front door. Your kids spend a lot of time with other adults. Their schools and daycares have policies for emergencies. Ask what they are. Who can pick up your child? What ID do they require? Where is the off-site reunification point if they have to evacuate the campus? Add the office number and one teacher’s contact to your plan. Email your card to them. Ask them to confirm they received it. This is boring but extremely effective. It moves their picture of your kid’s world closer to yours.
Caregivers need the same page you have. If you use FRS radios, show them how to turn one on and choose the family channel. Put the plan somewhere obvious: fridge, diaper bag. If you’re away when something happens, you don’t want improvisation. You want execution.
Pets are family. Add the vet’s number. Make sure their microchips are registered and note the numbers. Keep current photos in your phone. If you have to leave home, leashes and carriers aren’t luxuries. They’re what make the difference between bringing a pet and losing one.
Plans aren’t sculptures. They’re appliances. They get dusty if you never touch them. If you put a little maintenance on the calendar, you won’t have to think about it again. Twice a year is enough. The day you change smoke alarm batteries is a good day to skim your plan. Update phone numbers. If you moved or a kid changed schools, rewrite the cards. Recharge the power banks. Rotate spare batteries. Press the alert button on the weather radio and make sure it still chirps. After big phone updates, check the settings to ensure the emergency alerts didn’t get silently turned off. This is the sort of thing software does.
If you want a rule of thumb for all of this, it’s to choose the plan you’ll actually run. Fancy plans have a way of staying in drawers. Simple ones live on fridges. The fewer steps, the more likely you’ll take them. The fewer choices, the less you’ll stall. When you’re stressed, you want to be able to point at a sentence and do what it says.
People often get stuck trying to make plans “complete.” Don’t. Write down the minimum and start. You can add detail later if you need it. What you lose in completeness you gain in speed. And speed is what you need in the real world. You can think of this like writing. If you’ve ever tried to write a hard email, you know the first draft unblocks you. It’s never perfect, but it makes everything after it easier. A plan is a first draft for a day you hope will never come.
There’s a broader lesson hiding in this: inertia is expensive. The day something happens is the worst day to discover gaps. The way to close gaps is to practice once in a while. Not obsessively. Just enough that your brain recognizes the path and stops trying to reinvent it when you’re tired.
Will you ever use this? Probably. The world doesn’t schedule its problems around your calendar. Ice storms and wildfires and outages happen to people who aren’t expecting them. The families who seem “lucky” are often just the ones who assume unlucky things will eventually happen.
The nice thing about communication plans is they’re cheap. A radio costs less than dinner out. A power bank costs less than a tank of gas. The page itself is free. This is not like buying a generator. It’s more like putting your keys in the same place every night. You do it once, and you keep doing it because it keeps working.
If you’re the parent who tends to handle logistics, you may be worried you’re overdoing it. You’re not. Overdoing it is building a bunker. This is writing down phone numbers and turning on a switch in your settings. If the words “overprepared” occur to you, consider the alternative. Underprepared people work harder later.
There are a lot of ways for the world to fail. Communication is one of the easiest to fix in advance. Decide on a hub. Decide on two places. Decide on a time limit. Turn on the alerts. Put a couple of radios in a drawer. Keep your power topped off when a storm’s coming. Make the wallet cards. Practice for five minutes. That’s the whole trick.
If you do this tonight, you’ll go to bed a little calmer. The weather may do what it wants. The grid may do what it wants. But you’ll know what you’re going to do. That’s what a plan buys you.