Planning for emergencies: are you ready

One of the easiest ways of preparing for emergencies is to identify ‘emergency friends’. Emergency friends should be people you trust who can help you in an emergency. You should identify at least one emergency friend who lives nearby and a second one who lives further away.

Emergency friends should arrange to help each other if one of their homes or members of family have been affected by an emergency. Examples of how you can help each other out include:

• swap house keys. You never know when you might lock yourself out or need pets feeding if you get stranded away from home
• provide each other with a place to stay if you have evacuated from your home or if it’s affected by flood, fire or utility failure
• arrange to look after each other’s children or to pick them up from school if you have an emergency at work or in the family
• if you are suffering from an infectious disease, like flu, the NHS might ask you to send someone to collect your medication for you
• keep copies of your most important documents or pictures safe for each other
• be an emergency point of contact for family members who may be separated in an emergency.

Make sure all your family knows who your emergency friends are and make a note of them in the Household Emergency Plan form in this booklet. Sit down and have a chat with each other so you identify all the ways you can help one another.

Find an ‘ICE’ partner, ICE stands for ‘In Case of an Emergency’. This is a quick and easy way for the emergency services to find the contact details of your next of kin if you are injured and unable to tell them who to contact.

This simple idea of storing the word ICE in your mobile phone address book before the name and number of the person you would want to be contacted, could be invaluable. Make sure that:

• the person whose name and number you are using has agreed to be your ICE partner.
• your ICE partner has a list of people they should contact on your behalf and knows any important medical information.
• if your ICE contact is deaf - type ICETEXT - then the name of your contact before saving the number.
• if you want more than one ICE partner, simply save them as ICE1, ICE2 etc.

There are several local schemes available to assist you to store important personal and medical information which would be useful to have available in an emergency. Coverage depends on location. Listed below are a couple of schemes, but many others are available:

• message in a bottle - for more information contact your local Lions Club.
• talisman bracelets - available from retailers.