PLN-10 · Family Emergency Plan · Lesson 02
Movement, Triggers, and Documentation
Where the household goes when it can’t talk, when it decides to move, and what paperwork has to survive the trip.
When Talking Fails: Rally Points
Lesson 01 ended with the emergency layer of your PACE plan: a place rather than a device. This lesson builds that place, and then everything that depends on it: how you get there, who collects the people who can’t get there on their own, when you decide to move, and what paperwork comes with you.
A rally point is a pre-agreed location where the household meets when home is unreachable or unsafe and nobody can call anyone. One rally point is not enough, for the same reason one means of communication is not enough: whatever stops you getting home may also stop you getting to the rally point. So rally points follow the same PACE logic as communications. There are four, tried in order, and each one sits further from the problem than the one before it.
| Tier | Typical distance | Used when |
|---|---|---|
| Primary (neighborhood) | Walking distance from home | A local, short-notice event: a house fire, a gas leak on the street, a power cut at night. |
| Alternate (local) | A short drive | The primary rally point itself is inaccessible or caught up in the same event. |
| Contingency (regional) | A meaningful drive | The local area as a whole is compromised: flooding across town, a wide evacuation zone. |
| Emergency | Further than daily life normally reaches | The true last resort, when the region itself is the problem. |
unreachable or unsafe
walk
short drive
regional
beyond the region
Figure 2.1 Rally points step outward from home, each further from the problem than the one before. You move one tier only when the current tier is caught up in the event; you never skip to the end. The code words are examples: short, distinct, and meaningless to anyone who overhears them.
Choosing each one is a judgment about what it has to survive. The primary should be somewhere a child could walk to and recognize: a named neighbor’s porch, a church, the end of a specific street. The alternate has to make sense on its own if your neighborhood is the problem. It should not simply be the place everyone drifts toward because it is familiar, because a familiar place in the affected area is still in the affected area. The contingency and emergency points are often a relative’s or friend’s home outside the region, and that person needs to know they are on your list, exactly as your out-of-area contact did in Lesson 01.
Give each rally point a code word as well as an address and UTM coordinates. “Go to Oak” is quicker and clearer over a radio than a street address, and it tells a stranger who overhears it nothing. That is a light measure, not real security, but it costs nothing.
Message Drops
Rally points assume everyone can wait there long enough to meet. Often they can’t. A message drop solves that: a pre-agreed physical spot where one person leaves word for another, without both being present at the same time. Each rally point should have one nearby, and each gets its own code word.
| Rally point | Message drop | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Somewhere you both go | Somewhere one of you leaves word for the other |
| Needs both people present | Yes, at the same time | No |
| What you do there | Meet, then act together | Read or leave a note, then move on |
A good drop is weatherproof, unlikely to be cleared away by anyone else, and easy to describe in a few words: under a particular bench, behind a particular sign. Keep a pencil and a zip-top bag there or in every bag the family carries. The note itself uses the same four parts as the check-in you agreed in Lesson 01: who, where, condition, next move, plus the time. “Dad. 1430. OK. Heading to Elm.” tells the next person everything they need.
Figure 2.2 A message drop separates arriving from meeting. Dad and Mom were never at the rally point at the same moment and neither phone worked, yet each knew exactly what the other was doing. The note uses the same four parts as the Lesson 01 check-in, plus the time.
Routes From Every Origin
Most plans are written as though the emergency starts at home. It usually doesn’t. On a weekday, the adults are at work and the children are at school, so the plan needs routes from each of those places, not just from the house. For every origin, record a primary and an alternate route to each rally point, on paper, with the turns written out.
One rule matters more than any other here: at least one rally point must be reachable on foot from every origin, whether that is home, work, or school. A plan whose every rally point needs a car fails the moment the car does: a dead battery, a blocked road, gridlock, or a parent who took the car to work. Walk the foot route at least once. A route that looks easy on a map can turn out to cross a highway with no crossing.
Routes also carry decision points: the places or conditions at which you change plan. “If the bridge on Route 30 is closed, take the river road.” “If smoke is visible from the ridge, skip the primary rally point and go straight to the alternate.” Deciding these now means nobody has to work them out at the side of a road.
Schools, Daycare, Pets, and Dependents
Some members of the household can’t follow the plan on their own. Small children, a parent with limited mobility, and pets all have to be collected by someone, and that someone may not be you. This section of the workbook records who they are, where they are, and the arrangements that let another trusted adult take responsibility for them.
| Who | What the plan records |
|---|---|
| School-age children | The school’s emergency release and reunification procedure; the adults on the child’s authorized pickup list; the school’s main and emergency numbers. |
| Children in daycare | The daycare’s notification chain (who they call, in what order) and the same pickup authorizations. |
| Adults who depend on others | Who checks on them, how, and the medications and equipment that must travel with them. |
| Pets | Vet name and number, vaccination records, microchip number, and who in the household is responsible for each animal. |
The pickup list is the entry most households get wrong. Schools generally release a child only to adults already on file. In an emergency, the adult who can actually reach the school may be a neighbor or your contingency contact, not a parent stuck an hour away. If that person is not on the list, they will be turned away at exactly the wrong moment. Ask each school and daycare for its emergency procedure, too. Many districts move students to a separate reunification site rather than releasing them from the building, and you need to know where that is before the day comes.
Deciding Before You Have To: PREP-CON Triggers
Everything so far answers where. The hardest question in a real emergency is usually when: when to pull the children from school, when to leave, when to stop watching the news and act. Families who wait until they are sure tend to move too late, because by the time everyone is sure, everyone else is moving too.
PREP-CON, short for Preparedness Conditions, is the framework FFTP uses to make that decision ahead of time. It is a five-level readiness scale. Level 5 is the everyday baseline; level 1 is an incident already underway. Each level pairs triggers, the observable events that move you to that level, with actions, what the household does when it gets there.
FFTP publishes a national reference reading each cycle, but your household sets its own level against its own criteria. Two sibling scales sit beside it, and they are easy to confuse: COMCON reports the health of communications networks and is one input to your level, and CONCON is your continuity posture once conditions have already deteriorated. This course uses only PREP-CON; PLN-05 and PLN-06 cover the other two.
Blue Sky
Build
Orange Sky
Monitor
Brown Sky
Coordinate
Gray Sky
Stage
Black Sky
Execute
Figure 2.3 Posture escalates as the level drops: build, monitor, coordinate, stage, execute. All of the planning happens first, at Blue Sky. By Black Sky there is nothing left to decide, only a plan to carry out. The shading shows rising severity; it is not the sky colors themselves.
| Level | State | Typical triggers | Posture |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 · Blue Sky | No incident | No known or anticipated threat to water, power, communications, banking, or food distribution. | Build: maintain supplies, train, update the plan |
| 4 · Orange Sky | Incident possible | Possible near-term disruption to communications, power, or financial systems; a severe weather watch. | Monitor: watch closely, verify contacts and equipment |
| 3 · Brown Sky | Incident probable | Elevated likelihood of disruption; supply shortages; public-health warnings. | Coordinate: notify your network, confirm the plan, check the bags |
| 2 · Gray Sky | Incident imminent | Disruption expected or highly likely in your area. | Stage: ready to move within two hours |
| 1 · Black Sky | Active incident | Active disruption of power, communications, or critical infrastructure; a no-notice event. | Execute: carry out the plan, leave or shelter |
Read the last column top to bottom: build, monitor, coordinate, stage, execute. By level 1 there is nothing left to plan, only things to do. That is the point of the framework. All the planning happens at level 5, in calm conditions. A trigger list written during an incident is a to-do list you are already behind on.
Two kinds of trigger
Triggers come in two kinds, and they are not handled the same way.
| Kind | What it is | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Direct | A specific, plain-language event: a fire at the fuel depot three miles away; an evacuation order for your zone; a confirmed release from a nearby rail line. | One is enough. A direct trigger justifies its level on its own. |
| Indicator-based | A slower-moving signal that gives lead time: a space-weather watch, sustained financial stress, rising public-health measures, strain on supply chains. | No single indicator is decisive. A sustained pattern within a category is what earns a level change. |
The distinction prevents two opposite mistakes. Treating every indicator as decisive has you staging the car every time a storm watch is issued, until the household stops taking the plan seriously. Waiting for a pattern before acting on a direct trigger has you watching a derailment on the news while the evacuation traffic builds. Your best direct triggers are usually local: a specific hazard within a specific distance of your home, such as a rail line carrying hazardous cargo or a nuclear plant within 50 miles.
A specific, plain-language event tied to a known hazard, or a no-notice event
Figure 2.4 Direct triggers act alone; indicators act only as a pattern. Asking the first question first prevents both mistakes this lesson describes: staging the car for every storm watch, and waiting for confirmation of something already happening three miles away.
You don’t write the trigger list from a blank page. The Triggers and Actions Annex in your workbook ships with a starting set for every level. Your job is to adopt, cut, and add: keep what fits, strike what doesn’t apply where you live, and add the local hazards only you know about. PLN-04 covers the full framework, including the indicator categories, in depth.
Two Separate Clocks
PREP-CON and your PACE plan run on separate clocks, and it is worth being clear about how they relate. PREP-CON is a judgment about how ready the household needs to be. PACE is a fallback sequence for communications, and it moves the instant your current means fails. A dead cell network on a Blue Sky afternoon still sends you to the alternate layer right away; you don’t wait for the level to change. A communications failure may also count as one indicator toward a higher level, but that is a separate decision.
The Contingency Binder
The last part of this lesson is the paperwork. The Contingency Binder holds the documents you would need once you reached a rally point and could not go home: the ones that prove who you are, what you own, and what you are owed. They are far easier to protect in advance than to replace afterward, often from an office that is itself affected by the same event.
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Identification and vital records | Copies of driver’s licenses, passports, birth and marriage certificates |
| Insurance and financial | Policy numbers and agent contacts, account contacts, deed or lease, vehicle titles |
| Medical and prescription | Prescription list with dosages, doctors’ contacts, insurance cards |
| School and pet records | Enrollment and pickup authorizations, vaccination and microchip records |
| Property documentation | Photos or video of every room and major possession, for insurance claims |
The property record is the one most people skip, and the one that pays off most after a fire or flood. Walk through the house with a phone camera, open the closets and drawers, and narrate as you go. Twenty minutes now can settle an insurance claim that would otherwise turn on your memory of what you owned.
Into the Workbook
By the end of this lesson, these sections of the Family Emergency Plan Workbook should be complete or well underway:
| Workbook section | What goes in |
|---|---|
| Rally Points (PACE) and Message Drops | Four rally points with address, UTM coordinates, and code word; a message drop near each. |
| Route mapping | Primary and alternate routes from home, work, and school to each rally point, with decision points. At least one foot route from every origin. Lesson 04 finishes this. |
| Schools, Daycare, Pets, Doctors, Hospitals, Pharmacies, Utilities | Release procedures, pickup authorizations, notification chains, vet and medical contacts. |
| Triggers and Actions Annex | The starter list adopted, cut, and added to, with your local hazards written in as direct triggers. |
| Contingency Binder Checklist | Each category gathered, and the property walkthrough recorded. |
Before you move on, make two phone calls: one to each school or daycare to confirm its release procedure and update the pickup list, and one to whoever hosts your contingency or emergency rally point to confirm they know.
The binder only helps if it survives the event and travels with you, and the same is true of the plan itself. Lesson 04 decides where the binder and the completed plan physically live, and who outside the household is allowed to see which parts.
| Complete this lesson’s Knowledge Check to continue |
| ← Lesson 01: Family Coordination and Communications | Course Map |
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