Identify Risks

The first step in creating a family emergency plan is to identify your family’s disaster risks. A disaster can be natural (such as an earthquake or hurricane) or manmade (such as a dam failure or nuclear power plant emergency). Whereas some disasters can happen to just about anyone, anywhere (contagious diseases, fires, power outages); other disasters depend on where your family lives (dam failures, earthquakes, hurricanes).

When a disaster occurs in the United States, emergency services are provided by local governments with the help of nearby municipalities, as well as state and volunteer agencies. In the case of a catastrophic disaster, the governor of the state can request assistance from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

One way to find out which disasters are more likely to occur in your neighborhood is to search through FEMA’s list of Declared Disasters by Year or State.