Emergency Preparedness Checklist: What To Do Before Disaster Strikes

We all hope to avoid earthquakes, floods, blizzards, and other similar life-changing events. But as many occur beyond our control, taking deliberate steps to prepare for unexpected situations is critical to keeping yourself and your loved ones safe.

National Preparedness Month, sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) every September, is a campaign that motivates households, businesses, and communities to better prepare for natural disasters and other unexpected crises. 

The month’s focus typically centers on three core actions: staying informed, building a communication and evacuation plan, and putting together an emergency supply kit built to last several days. These are the fundamentals of any solid preparedness checklist, but real readiness when a disaster strikes means going a step further and tailoring that foundation to your own household and area.

What Is Emergency Preparedness and Response?

Emergency preparedness refers to the proactive steps you take before a disaster strikes to better respond to it and cope with the aftermath. It’s built around five key areas:

• Prevention: Actions that stop a hazard from occurring in the first place, such as fire-safety measures or floodplain regulations
• Mitigation: Steps that reduce the impact of a disaster you can’t fully prevent, like reinforcing a structure or buying insurance
• Preparedness: The planning and readiness work, such as building a kit, creating a household plan, and knowing your risks before anything happens
• Response: The actions taken during and immediately after a disaster to protect people, property, and pets
• Recovery: The process of rebuilding and returning to normal once the immediate danger has passed

Unlike emergency response, which involves taking action during and after a disaster, emergency preparedness is continuous planning, training, and stockpiling before a crisis strikes. The specific actions you take depend on the potential hazards in your area and your personal needs. The checklist below walks through what that looks like in practice.

What To Include in Your Emergency Preparedness Plan

A strong emergency preparedness plan involves more than building an emergency kit. The sections below walk through what else to cover, from understanding your area’s specific risks to keeping your plan up to date over time.

1. Know Your Area’s Specific Risks

Every area faces different challenges. One may be more prone to wildfires, while another one may frequently encounter floods from overflowing rivers or coastal storms. That’s why it’s important to understand specific local conditions, risks, and emergency infrastructure. Staying informed on area-specific risks helps you keep your preparation focused and effective, preventing property damage and injuries.

Your emergency preparedness checklist should account for both weather and non-weather emergencies, such as outages or utility disruptions. For specific weather event guidance, you can find helpful resources on ready.gov, the National Weather Service, and in your local public safety departments, or review BELFOR’s guides:

• Hurricane preparedness
• Tornado preparedness
• Flood preparedness
• Preparing for severe thunderstorms

2. Create a Household Emergency Plan

A household emergency plan can help your entire family stay calm, safe, and ready to act quickly in emergencies. It outlines:

• Evacuation and sheltering considerations
• Meeting locations and communication strategies
• Household roles and responsibilities
• Emergency contacts and other important information

This emergency preparedness month, consider every family member and their medical and mobility needs, and plan for them in case of emergencies. For example, older individuals may require special evacuation routes, such as avoiding stairways, while you may want to place kennel-trained pets near exits rather than bedrooms.

3. Build Your Emergency Preparedness Kit

An emergency preparedness kit is a collection of basic items your household may need in a crisis, at home or during an evacuation. Store emergency preparedness supplies in airtight plastic bags within one or two easily accessible, lightweight containers. A plastic bin or duffel bag is a common container choice. 

This emergency preparedness month, build a kit for each member of your household, including pets.

Core Essentials

• 1 gallon of water per household member per day
• 3-day supply of non-perishable, shelf-stable food
• Emergency broadcast radio (battery-powered or hand-crank)
• Backup power banks and extra batteries
• Flashlight
• Local, physical maps

First Aid and Medical Supplies

• First aid kit
• Prescription medications (minimum seven-day supply)
• Over-the-counter medicine (pain relievers, anti-diarrheal medicine, and antacids)
• Backup medical gear (prescription eyeglasses, contact lenses)

Sanitation and Environmental Safety

• Personal hygiene products (moist towelettes, toothbrush and toothpaste, hand sanitizer)
• Dust masks or N95 masks
• Plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal windows and doors

4. Establish an Emergency Communication Plan

An emergency communication plan is about knowing who to contact and how to reach them, whether you’re already together when the disaster strikes or separated across workplaces, school, and errands. Deciding this in advance means everyone knows who to call, where to go, and how to reconnect if phone lines or internet services are unreliable.

This emergency preparedness month, make sure your plan covers:

• Written and digital contact lists: Keep contacts for local first responders, poison control, doctors, and veterinarians. A phone can be lost, damaged, or die, so a physical backup ensures the information is still there when you need it.
• A safe meeting place outside of the home: If a fire or gas leak forces everyone out through different exits, a set location keeps the household from wasting time searching for each other, or worse, going back inside to look.
• An out-of-area contact: Local lines can get overloaded during a widespread emergency, but a call to someone farther away often goes through, letting the family check in through one shared point.
• More than one way to communicate: A text sometimes sends when calls won’t connect, and apps or radios offer a backup if cell networks are down.

It’s also important to coordinate these details with schools, workplaces, caregivers, and other relevant organizations, such as emergency services.

5. Plan Evacuation Routes and Shelters

Your emergency preparedness checklist should include instructions for both sheltering in place and evacuations. 

For sheltering in place: You want to define safe areas in the home. The safest areas often vary, depending on the event. For example, during tornadoes, the safest place is the lowest and most central area of the home, away from doors and windows, whereas during potential flash flood events. Ensure these safe spaces include access to supplies, such as your emergency kits.

For evacuations: You want to identify evacuation routes, stipulate destinations, and pick a vehicle or means of transportation. If you need to leave quickly, the “5 Ps of Preparedness” can help you decide what to grab:

• People and pets: Make sure everyone is accounted for and has what they need to travel.
• Prescriptions: Grab all the necessary medications and medical devices.
• Papers: Keep essential documents, like IDs and insurance policies, with you.
• Personal needs: Have a ready-to-go bag with essentials — clothes, water, and personal care items.
• Priceless items: If time and space allow, take anything irreplaceable.

This emergency preparedness month, check your local area for information about pre-defined routes and shelters.

6. Prepare Your Property and Minimize Potential Damage

Emergency preparedness extends to maintaining your property and safety equipment, such as sump pumps and generators, to help prevent damage and ensure everything functions properly when needed. For example, you should keep smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in working order to limit the risk of house fires and clear exterior water lines regularly during winter to avoid frozen pipes. Installing storm shutters, reinforced roofing, or impact-resistant windows can also help you mitigate property vulnerabilities from weather conditions such as hail and wind damage.

Beyond weather damage prevention, emergency preparation is about protecting personal property and assets by:

• Maintaining accessible copies of insurance policies, identification, medical information, property records, and other important contracts with physical or backed-up digital storage
• Creating a basic home inventory, including photos or documentation of major belongings
• Keeping insurer and emergency property response contact information readily available

It also helps to know who to contact when property damage requires professional assistance. Timely services can make all the difference in securing your property and mitigating any further damage during emergencies.

BELFOR’s emergency response services are available around the clock, 365 days a year, to help homeowners recover from fire, water, storm, and other property-loss events. Our trained personnel act quickly on your report and dispatch a crew to begin mitigating damage and start the restoration process.

7. Stay Informed With Local Alerts and Emergency Information

Preparedness also means keeping up with local, regional, and national alerts and information. This helps you assess risk and respond to threats in a timely manner.  Emergency notification systems, such as CodeRed, Smart911, Everbridge, or Nixle, can help you stay on top of local emergencies, from severe weather to public safety incidents. If you’re not already, sign up for these tools, as broad, automatic systems like Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) send alerts only for extreme, immediate threats to broad geographic areas.

This emergency preparedness month, double-check your battery-powered or hand-crank radios. In case of a blackout, these will keep you on top of official evacuation, shelter, and safety guidance.

8. Practice, Review, and Update Your Emergency Plan

Households routinely change: family members move in and out, new pets get adopted, and medications switch. National Preparedness Month reminds you to stay proactive and keep your emergency plan current.

Every emergency preparedness month, revisit evacuation routes, meeting locations, contacts, and household responsibilities. Take the time to check your kits, ensuring nothing is outdated. Test batteries for backup radios and power supplies for other communication devices.

Emergency Response: What To Do When Disaster Strikes

When a disaster happens, such as a fire or flood, follow a standard emergency response procedure:

• Prioritize immediate personal safety
• Call 911 or emergency services when necessary
• Follow official evacuation or shelter instructions
• Put the household emergency plan into action
• Communicate with household members when safe
• Avoid entering unsafe or damaged areas

Your immediate actions will depend on the specific emergency and whether you’ve received directions from public-safety officials. Official instructions should always take precedence.

After the initial disaster response, when the immediate danger has passed, assess the situation and document any damage. Contact your insurance company for further guidance and rely on BELFOR’s emergency response services to quickly restore affected areas before they cause further damage to your property.

Make Emergency Preparedness Part of Your Plan Before Disaster Strikes

Emergency preparedness can’t prevent disasters, but it is an important part of staying resilient in challenging times. When you know how to make decisions, gather resources, and identify support before a disaster strikes, you are better prepared to respond and recover. 

This emergency preparedness month is an opportunity to review an existing plan or develop your first one, giving yourself and your family an edge before emergencies.

BELFOR is your mitigation and recovery partner. We are the ones you call after a fire, flood, storm, water emergency, or other property loss event. Our team provides residential mitigation and restoration services to address primary damage while limiting secondary issues.

Contact BELFOR to learn more about our services or to discuss your property concerns.