Step Fifteen: Family Crisis Drills - How to Make a Preparedness Plan that Works

"Emergency preparedness is a team sport.“
Eric Whitaker

Step Fifteen: Family Crisis Drills

We all have office, school and home fire drills – we should all have regular Crisis Drills. We want to be prepared to think fast during a crisis and not loose precious seconds to the fog of uncertainty, panic, shock and confusion.

Think of football teams, do they just practice the passes and running plays? No way – they also practice what to do when a pass is intercepted or there is a fumble. In these cases the offensive team must instantaneously change into defense mode and reduce the “hit” this fumble or interception causes. The really good football teams practice and do this instantaneously, seamlessly and without thought.

This does NOT mean that you take a week off from work and hole up in your house and practice “sheltering in place”. Remember those balances? Good. This means we practice the worst case scenario, which for most of us are the two mobility issues.

At minimum twice a year (3-4 times a year is ideal) have a crisis drill. One will address getting to your retreat immediately following a practice crisis and the other should address having to vacate your retreat – with at least one based on the worst possible situation – On Foot.

You can spice things up by having a contest on how quick everyone can make it to a rendezvous spot or load the vehicle and the like.

These drills are to ultimately ‘train’ us so as to cut our reaction time to facilitate keeping our survivability quotient high, without thinking, so that we can Act to Win instead of React and Loose or make do.

Next week we will put all this information into creating our Preparedness Plan …

ACT or REACT - The Need for Disaster Drills http://www.scribd.com/doc/28760473/Act-or-React-%E2%80%93-The-Need-for-Disaster-Drills
Preparedness Survival Drills By Code Name Insight (CNI) http://www.codenameinsight.com/files/PreparednessSurvival%20Drills.pdf or http://www.codenameinsight.com/files/ and the select PreparednessSurvival Drills.pdf