Guides
How Do I Build a Household Emergency Plan?
Start with your household's hazards, then check the seven lifelines, then build the ten capabilities one at a time. PrepCompass walks this sequence in order and always tells you the single next action — so you make progress in minutes, not weekends.
Step 1: Answer short questions about your household
A plan only works if it fits your home: who lives there, what risks you face, and what you already have. PrepCompass starts with short questions about your household and current preparedness, and builds a personalized plan from the answers.
Step 2: Review your hazards
The six hazards the method covers are earthquake, wildfire and smoke, flood, severe storm, heat wave, and extended outage. Your plan weights the ones that apply to where you live.
Step 3: Check the seven lifelines
Lifelines are the essentials a household cannot do without: safety and security, food, water and shelter, health and medical, energy, communications, transportation, and hazardous materials. Checking each one shows where a disruption would hurt first.
Step 4: Build the ten capabilities, one at a time
Capabilities are the things a household can actually do: practice self-care, establish mutual assistance, establish energy sources, protect health and safety, secure supplies, manage food and water, establish shelter, establish communications, avoid secondary hazards, and address injuries. You build them in order of what matters most, not all at once.
Step 5: Take the next best action — then reassess
At any moment there is one action that matters most. Do it, and the plan reassesses and picks the next one. Over time the loop — hazards, lifelines, capabilities, next best actions, readiness — is what keeps a plan current instead of letting it go stale.
More reading: Our Approach · What is PrepCompass? · How the Next Best Action Engine works