Eight steps, in this order. Each one feeds the next, and you can stop after any of them and still be better off than you were. The last step prints everything you filled in as one clean binder.
Score where you actually stand, see what you could and couldn't get through, and get a short list of what to do next in the order that matters. Everything you enter stays in your own browser.
A high average doesn't save you if one thing is missing. Each line checks the specific items that scenario actually needs.
Ordered by how much readiness each move buys, not by how much it costs. Work down the list.
These don't score you. They size the numbers in your results — gallons of water, calories, how many bodies are relying on the plan.
Check only what you could do today, unsupervised, without looking it up. This doesn't change your readiness score — it decides where you'd be most useful to a group, and what your group is missing.
Twelve jobs that a group of households has to cover. Your top three are where you'd be handed work first.
Nothing here is uploaded anywhere. Copy the card and send it to whoever is organizing your group. The readiness line on it comes from your score on tab 01.
Choose any combination. The plan below rebuilds itself as you select — including the parts where two of your scenarios want you to do opposite things, which is the part worth knowing before it happens.
Before it arrives is what you can only do while there is still warning time. Then Primary is what you do if it works the way you expect, Alternate the equally good second way, Contingency what you fall back to when both are gone, and Emergency the last thing that still keeps people alive. Every line is scored against every scenario you picked — a move that only one of them needs is labeled, so you can see what's shared and what's specialty.
Everything on the readiness index still applies. These are the items your particular combination requires that a generic kit doesn't have.
Your scenario picks generate a matching set of drills — plus the response protocols for a bump in the night, code words, and choosing where you'd go. They live on the Drill & Respond tab so they don't get buried at the bottom of this one.
Only tick what you've confirmed from a primary source, not what you saw a headline about. The weights are deliberate: what's happening on your own street counts for more than what's happening on another continent, because that's what the outcome data says.
Nothing gets bought within 24 hours of a headline. The preparedness industry runs on urgency, and the moment you feel it is the moment your judgment is worst. Sleep on it. The thing will still be for sale.
Act on tripwires you wrote down in advance, not on how the news feels. If you can't point to the line you set before today, you're reacting, not planning.
Two independent primary sources, or it didn't happen. A screenshot of a post about an article is zero sources.
Separate "affects the country" from "affects my county." Most national alarm never reaches your street. The exception — weather, your utility, your employer — is the one worth acting on immediately.
Most spikes resolve. Strikes settle, prices retrace, conflicts stay regional. Over-reacting has real costs: money you needed elsewhere, credibility with your family, attention you owe your actual life. A prepared person is calm because they're prepared, not vigilant because they're afraid.
A monthly half hour through this list beats a daily hour of feeds — and it's how you find out whether a headline is a real change or a normal fluctuation.
This runs entirely in your browser and asks for nothing that identifies you — a state and sixteen things you can see from your own porch. Geography drives most of your risk, but the site details drive whether a hazard becomes an emergency: the same storm is an inconvenience with two roads out and a crisis with one.
The ranking above is arithmetic. These are the things that actually decide how a bad day goes at your address.
What's above is a coarse model built from state-level patterns and your own answers — good enough to plan from, not good enough to bet a building on. These four lookups take a specific address and give you the real number. Do them once; write the answers on the plan.
Take a screenshot of your property from any satellite map — Google Maps in satellite view, or your county's parcel viewer, which also shows your lines. Load it here, tap to mark what matters, and this page lays out cameras, sensors, lights, signs, and the dog the way a security consultant would if their only job were that the kids are never surprised. The image is drawn on this page only; if you allow it, it is kept in this browser so it's here next time.
Pick a tool, then tap the map. Start with the house and the point where your drive meets the public road — those two are required. Add driveway points in order from the road to the house so the plan follows the real curve. Everything else is optional but changes the answer: outbuildings and guest units, water, the play area, which side the kids sleep on, any other way onto the land, and the nearest neighbor (so no camera looks at them).
Set the scale if you can: tap two points you know the distance between — a driveway you've measured, the long side of a house, a fence line — and enter the feet. With scale the plan gives real distances and your warning time; without it you get placements and rules of thumb.
A sensor that just makes noise gets ignored within a month. These rules turn alerts into decisions, and they're the part to rehearse on the drill tab.
The map puts things in the right places. These are the principles behind the placements, and the parts of a real plan that no map can show — doors, zones, habits.
This doesn't tell you how likely something is — the site profile does that. It tells you, if it happened at a given distance, what would actually arrive at your door, and when. Most of the value is in the second list: the things that would not reach you at all. That list is usually longer than people expect, and it's the part that turns a fear into a plan.
Wind matters enormously for anything airborne — fallout, ash, smoke, chemical release. In the Southeast the prevailing flow is broadly southwest to northeast, so a site north or west of a city is usually crosswind or upwind of it. That is a general pattern, not a guarantee: check the actual forecast winds aloft on the day.
Everything above is a coarse propagation model built from documented cases. For three of these questions there are real, public modeling tools that will do far better than a lookup table, and they take a specific location.
Quantities are computed from your household and the duration you pick, not copied from a generic checklist. The food figures use the standard per-adult home-storage ratios, with shelf lives taken from the BYU and Utah State multi-decade taste-panel research rather than from marketing claims.
Tick what's true of your household — each one adds items and changes quantities
Same household, same conditions, five time horizons. The jump between them is not linear — the first two weeks are cheap and the year is dominated by two line items, which is the most useful thing on this page for deciding where money goes.
Prices drift; specifications don't. Each line gives you the thing to check — the thickness of the mylar, the micron rating of the filter, whether the tourniquet came from the actual manufacturer.
Where the same goods cost dramatically less. Bulk staples from a feed store, a restaurant supply house, or a Latter-day Saints home storage center — the last of these sells wheat, rice, beans, oats and milk powder in sealed cans at close to cost, to anyone, member or not. Fuel and propane from a local supplier on a summer pre-buy rather than a winter spot delivery. Medical gear from a genuine medical supplier rather than a marketplace, which is also the only way to avoid counterfeit tourniquets.
What to never buy on price alone: tourniquets and hemostatic gauze, respirators, carbon monoxide alarms, and anything that holds pressure or fuel. Everything else on this list is a commodity and you should buy it like one.
The rule that saves the most money: buy depth in what you already eat before you buy anything specialized. Bucket kits are the most expensive calories on the list and the least likely to be eaten.
The preparedness industry is worth billions and runs largely on affiliate commissions, which means the incentive structure rewards alarm and gear-selling over sober risk assessment. That doesn't make the space useless — it means you read it with the incentives in view. Four tests that sort it quickly:
Grouped to match the domains on the readiness index. Flagged where a source is excellent but has a bias worth knowing about.
Real programs with real enrollment, not reading lists. Costs are typical 2026 ranges and vary by region — several of the best ones are free. Ordered by return on the hours you put in, which is roughly the reverse of how impressive they sound.
Stop the Bleed, CERT, and a ham radio Technician license. Together they cost under a hundred dollars and about thirty hours, and they cover the three gaps that money genuinely cannot close: someone bleeding in front of you, knowing how to work alongside responders in the first chaotic hour, and communicating when the towers are down.
All three also put you in a room with the people who would be around you in an actual emergency — which, on the evidence, is most of the value.
The numbers people get wrong under pressure. Printed on paper, these still work when nothing else does.
A plan you have never run is a guess. These are sized for an ordinary weekend without turning your household into a militia — most take under an hour. If you have picked scenarios on the planner, the list narrows to match; otherwise you get all of them. The point of every one is to find the three things that don't work while it is still funny.
Five things your body has to be able to do for any of the rest of this to work. Test them once a season. None needs equipment beyond a jug of water and a flight of stairs.
Water is the heaviest thing you will ever move in an emergency, and it moves in exactly this unit.
Extrapolates to five miles in under two hours — the distance between a stranded vehicle and help, or between home and a rally point.
The sit-to-rise test. Low scores predict poor outcomes under physical stress better than almost any other simple test, and it improves fast with practice.
Grip is what carries a child, holds a rope, and keeps you attached to something in moving water.
A crude but honest cardiac test. If you cannot talk at the top, your heart is the first thing that fails in a long day of work.
Nothing here needs a gym. Carry the jug up the stairs daily. Walk with the pack three times a week and add distance slowly. Sit and rise from the floor every day. Hang from something. Take the stairs. Six weeks of that moves most adults from two passes to four, and it is the only category on this page where the gain compounds into everything else.
Almost every one of these is the ice maker, the HVAC, a pet, wind, a branch, or a family member coming home late. That is not a reason to ignore it — it is the reason the protocol has to be one you can run at two in the morning without hurting anyone you love.
Clearing a structure is a trained-team task, and a person doing it alone at night, half awake, with family members in the building, is how the wrong person gets shot. Every professional body that teaches this teaches the same thing: you are not searching, you are gathering.
Either the children come to you, or you go to them. Pick one, make it the same every single time, and drill it — because a household that improvises this at 2am ends up with people moving past each other in a dark hallway. If the children are small or far down the house, go to them; if they are old enough to move reliably, they come to you.
A locked interior door, a wedge, and a light are worth more than anything you could carry down the hall. Keep a bright light and a charged phone within arm's reach of the bed. That is the actual preparation for this scenario.
Give the address the way a dispatcher needs it, not the way you'd tell a friend — that is why it's on the card. Say how many people are in the house and where you are. Stay connected; put it on speaker.
Lights, noise, a raised voice saying you have called the police. The overwhelming majority of people who enter an occupied house leave the instant they learn it is occupied, because an empty house was the entire plan. You are not negotiating; you are removing their reason to be there.
The best-documented lethal error in this whole subject is misidentification — a teenager coming home, a neighbor checking on you, an evacuee looking for help. Positive identification before any action, every time, without exception. If you cannot identify, you do not act; you stay behind the door and let the people with radios and lights do it.
Shaking someone awake produces "what? WHAT?" at full volume, which is the opposite of what you want. A wake-up signal works when it is unmistakable, never said casually, and quiet: a specific touch does the waking, a short flat phrase tells them to stay silent, and the pair means exactly one next move you've already agreed. Rehearse it once, for the reflex. The worked examples below show the shape.
Two firm squeezes on the shoulder, then hold. The hold is what stops them sitting up and talking. Squeeze, squeeze, and keep your hand there.
Said flat and quiet, twice. Any of these shapes work because they are ordinary, short, and something you'd never say in bed at 2am:
“Blue door. Blue door.” · “Check the gate.” · “The porch light's on.” · “Wake up, it's Tuesday.”
Agree that it means exactly one sequence, so nobody has to think. For example: “You go to the kids, I'm calling, we meet in their room.” Say the sequence out loud once now, and it will be there at 2am.
Avoid anything that sounds like an emergency out loud — no “someone's here,” no names, no “call 911.” If you are wrong, you have woken the house for nothing; if you are right, you have told them where you are and that you know.
A word that means "I cannot speak freely, send help." These are standard practice in personal-safety training and in domestic-violence advocacy, and they work — but only if they are simple enough to recall while frightened. Households that invent eight codes remember none. Pick two.
Everything below is published on the internet, which means it is not secret. They are here to show you the shape that works — then build your own from your family's own vocabulary: a nickname nobody outside uses, a place only you have been, a running joke. Something a stranger could not guess and would not notice.
“Did Aunt Carol ever call you back?” · “Have you heard from Uncle Ray?” · “Did you remember to feed Sadie?” (there is no Sadie)
It survives being overheard because it sounds like nothing at all. The listener's script is fixed: answer normally — “No, not yet, I'll try her” — end the call the way you always would, then call 911. They never say “wait, are you okay?”
“We're all set here, everything's green.” · “Home now, dog's fed.” · “All good — coffee's on.”
Its absence is the signal. A check-in without the all-clear word means treat this as unverified, even if nothing sounds wrong.
A bare “///” or “x7” on its own line · or a full innocuous sentence: “Can you water the plants?”
Pair it with a rule: if anyone sends it, nobody replies asking what's wrong. They call the police and then call the out-of-area contact.
Family password for anyone claiming to collect them: “copper lantern” · “yellow tractor” · “blue biscuit”. Concrete and odd is easier for a child to hold than anything abstract.
Come-to-me-now word: a single short one — “Anchor” · “Rally” · “Nest”. Same word for the shelter room, the parking lot, and the woods. Teach it as a game they win.
Police, no visible reaction: “Can you check whether the blue folder is still in the office?”
Medical, which is what will actually happen: “We need the green kit at unit three.” Post both back-of-house, train them on day one, refresh each season.
“Text landed by nine. No text by half past, you call. No answer by ten, you call the sheriff.”
The only signal that works when someone cannot reach a phone at all — which is the situation none of the others cover.
The most common evacuation plan in America is "we'd go to my brother's," and the most common flaw in it is that the brother has never been asked. A destination is not a plan until someone at the other end is expecting you.
Stations lose power and lines form within the hour. If your destination requires a fuel stop, it is a fair-weather destination. This one test eliminates most of the places people name.
Gridlock from a mass evacuation routinely extends fifty to a hundred miles along the primary routes. A destination that is closer but on a secondary road beats one that is further out on the interstate everybody chose.
Have the conversation now, while it is hypothetical and easy. Agree how many people and animals, roughly how long, and what you would bring. Offer them the same in return — reciprocity is what makes it hold.
A cabin in the floodplain is not a flood refuge. A ridge property is not a wildfire refuge. Run the destination through the site-risk profile the same way you ran your own address, and pick one whose top hazards are not yours.
Otherwise you have driven three hours to have the same problem in an unfamiliar house with fewer supplies.
Yours, family, or a written arrangement. Arriving somewhere you have no claim to, in a crisis, is a much worse position than it sounds when you are planning it.
Time the route with the family and the animals actually loaded. Stay a night. You will find the bridge with the weight limit, the road that floods, and the fact that the well pump there is also on grid power.
The secondary sits in a different direction. If the primary is north, the secondary is south or east. A secondary twenty minutes from the primary is not a second option; it is the same option with extra steps, because whatever closed one road closed both.
Different host, different hazard. Two destinations that both depend on your sister means one family emergency removes both. Two destinations in the same river valley means one flood removes both.
Then a tier that needs no invitation at all. This is the one almost nobody writes down, and it is the one that gets used. A named chain hotel outside the region with your loyalty number on file, a state park with cabins you know the booking line for, a church or denominational network that runs shelters, a relative-of-a-relative you have at least met. Write down the actual names and numbers. "We'd figure something out" is not a tier.
Cache what you can, where you can. If your primary is somewhere you have standing — a family property, your own land — a plastic tote of water treatment, food, a change of clothes per person, a headlamp and a copy of the documents costs very little and removes the pressure to load perfectly under time.
The rest of this page assumes a working screen. This part assumes nothing. Fill it in once, then print each of the three versions below — one where each person sleeps, one in each vehicle, one with the go-bags. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.
Three versions from the same information. Print all three: the home card goes where people sleep, the vehicle card lives in each glovebox, and the bug-out card rides with the go-bags and with whoever is expecting you.