PLN-10 · Family Emergency Plan · Lesson 01

Family Coordination and Communications

Who your household calls, in what order, and by what means when the obvious way stops working.

Decisions, Not Supplies

Most households that prepare for emergencies start with things: water, flashlights, a first aid kit, a bag by the door. Those matter, and Lesson 03 covers them. But supplies don’t answer the questions that actually stall a family in the first hour of an emergency. Who calls whom? What happens when nobody picks up? Where does a twelve-year-old go when school lets out early and the phones aren’t working?

Those are decisions, and they share one property: they are easy to make on a calm afternoon and very hard to make while something is going wrong. This course turns the blank sections of your Family Emergency Plan Workbook into decisions your household has made and agreed to. It starts with the most basic one, because every later lesson depends on it: a contact list everyone can rely on, and a way to use it that doesn’t collapse the moment the cell network does.

Three patterns explain most households that have no working plan when they need one. The blank page: you know you should write a plan, you don’t know where to start, so you don’t. The “we’ll figure it out” assumption: everyone will call each other and meet somewhere obvious, which depends on phones working and on everyone remembering a plan that was never actually agreed. And drift: the plan written once and never updated, until the numbers are wrong and the people have moved. The workbook solves the first. This course is aimed at the second. Lesson 04 deals with the third.

The Family Roster

The roster is the first page of the plan and the least glamorous. It records, for every member of the household, the information a stranger would need to help them: a paramedic, an emergency room nurse, a school administrator, or a neighbor collecting your child. The point is that nobody has to recite it from memory under stress, and that it exists somewhere other than one person’s head.

Two practical rules. First, the roster lives on paper as well as on a phone. Most people no longer know anyone’s number; they know a name in a contact list. A dead or lost phone takes the whole list with it. Second, children carry a short version: a wallet card with the key names and numbers, and at least one of those numbers memorized by any child old enough to do it. The number they memorize should be the out-of-area contact’s, for reasons the next two sections make clear.

The roster holds personal information by design: medical details, birth dates, where your children go to school. That raises a real question about who should see it and where it should be stored. Lesson 04 handles that decision. For now, write it down completely.

The Contact Hierarchy

A contact list with no order is a list of people everyone tries at once, and that is a problem in two ways. Nobody knows who has already reached whom, and an overloaded network gets more overloaded. The plan solves this with four contact roles, tried in order.

Read the third column down and the logic of the order becomes clear. Each step moves the contact one ring further from the problem. The primary and alternate are inside the household, so anything that affects the house can affect them both. The contingency contact lives outside your home but nearby: unaffected by a kitchen fire, still caught by a county-wide flood. The out-of-area contact sits outside the region entirely, which is what makes that role different from all the others.

Choosing the primary is a practical decision, not a ranking of who is in charge. The primary should be whoever is most reliably reachable on a normal day. In a household where one adult works from home and the other commutes an hour, the person at home is usually the better primary, whatever else is true about the household.

The Out-of-Area Contact: Your Relay Node

The out-of-area contact does a job no local contact can do. When something hits your area, everyone in it reaches for a phone at the same time and the local network saturates. Calls leaving the affected area often connect when calls across town do not. FEMA’s Ready.gov makes the same point in its family communication guidance: a long-distance call may be easier to complete than a local one.

That makes the out-of-area contact a relay node. Separated family members don’t need to reach each other; they only need to reach one fixed number. Each person checks in with the relay, and the relay tells everyone else what it knows.

Neither family member has to reach the other. Both only have to reach one number outside the affected area.

A check-in everyone can send

A relay works best when every check-in carries the same four things, in the same order, short enough for a child to send by text. Agree on it now and write it on the wallet cards.

Sent as one line, “Maya. School gym. OK. Staying until picked up.” is a complete report the relay can pass on word for word. Text is the right default for it: a short text message often gets through when a call won’t, and it keeps the network clearer for others.

Getting the relay to agree

An out-of-area contact who doesn’t know they are one is not a relay. Before you write a name into the workbook, have the conversation. They need to know three things: that they are your relay; what to do when someone checks in (note the time and the message, and answer anyone in the family who asks); and what to do if someone has not checked in within a window you agree on together.

Choose with some care. The best relay is reliably reachable and unlikely to be caught by the same event you are. A relative who travels constantly is a weak choice. So is one who lives in the same storm track, such as another coastal town on the same stretch of shoreline.

PACE: Four Means, Four Different Failure Points

The contact hierarchy says who to reach. PACE says how. It stands for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency, and it is a list of four means of communication tried in order. The order matters less than one rule: each layer must keep working after the failure that kills the layer above it. Four ways to communicate that share one weak point are really one way, written four times.

Read each layer against the one above it. The alternate is useful because it can run on a different network from the primary: a phone on a working Wi-Fi connection can still message when the cell network is jammed. Be honest about where it stops: if the outage is the power or the internet itself, the alternate fails with the primary. That is exactly why the contingency layer exists. It depends on no commercial infrastructure at all. The emergency layer is the floor beneath everything: a place, not a device. Lesson 02 builds it.

One more rule, about when you move down the layers. Lesson 02 introduces PREP-CON, the readiness levels a household steps through as conditions worsen. PACE does not wait for a level change. The moment your current means of communication stops working, for whatever reason, you move to the next layer. A communications failure may also count toward raising your readiness level, but the two are separate decisions, made separately.

Radio, in planning terms

This course doesn’t teach radio operation, but the plan has to record a few radio decisions. GMRS requires an FCC license but no exam, and one license covers immediate family members. Amateur radio requires passing a license exam and offers far more range and capability. FRS radios need no license at all, but their range is short. For the workbook, record which radios the household has, who is licensed for what, and the channel or frequency you have agreed to use.

Then record one more thing most plans miss: when. A phone rings to get your attention; a radio only works if someone is listening at the other end. Agree on check-in times, such as the first five minutes of every hour, so that two family members with radios are actually on the air at the same moment.

Finally, note your county’s NOAA Weather Radio code in the Communications Plan. A weather radio is receive-only. It tells you what is happening; it doesn’t connect you to anyone. It belongs in the plan as an information source, not as a PACE layer.

Recording Locations: Address Plus Coordinates

Every location in this part of the workbook, including each contact’s home, each workplace, and each school, gets two entries: the street address and its UTM coordinates. This pattern repeats through the rest of the workbook, so it is worth learning once, here.

The reason is what happens to an address in a bad situation. Read aloud over a poor radio link or relayed through a third person, “the house on Church Road” can mean three different places. Street signs come down in storms, and navigation apps need the very networks this plan assumes may be gone. A coordinate is unambiguous when spoken, and it works with a paper map or any GPS receiver. That matters most for the out-of-area contact, who may have to pass a location back to you. FFTP’s navigation courses cover reading and plotting coordinates; for this lesson, look them up once and write them down.

Into the Workbook

By the end of this lesson, these sections of the Family Emergency Plan Workbook should be complete:

Then do one thing that turns this from paperwork into a plan: test it this week. Have each family member send the four-part check-in to your out-of-area contact, and have the contact reply with what they received. It takes five minutes, and it will find the wrong number before an emergency does.