Prepare In A Year 2025 - January

Download: Prepare In A Year 2025 - January

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Topic: Receiving Alerts and Creating a Family Communications Plan.

Welcome to Prepare In A Year. Our goal is to help guide you to develop YOUR desired level of preparedness in a series of small tasks over the next twelve months. We will be suggesting action steps as well as recommending levels of preparedness. Our plan is to follow the Disaster Ready Washington program as laid out here: https://mil.wa.gov/preparedness 

January Action Steps:

1. Sign up for PC-Alert and activate as many Government Alerts as desired on your phones.
2. Determine both on- and off-island meet-up points for your family.
3. Fill out the attached form (download link), giving each family member and contact a copy.

Alerts – they are only good if you receive them
How can you find out if there is an emergency? The sooner you know, the better you can plan your actions. Here are some ways to get informed:

1. PC-Alert
This is run by Pierce County, but you must sign up for it to receive notifications. https://www.piercecountywa.gov/921/Pierce-County-ALERT

2. Wireless Emergency Alerts - WEAs

These are short emergency messages from authorized federal, state, local, tribal and territorial public alerting authorities that can be broadcast from cell towers to any WEA‐
enabled mobile device in a locally targeted area. Wireless providers primarily use cell broadcast technology for WEA message delivery. WEA is a partnership among FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and wireless providers to enhance public safety.

These alerts can be enabled on your iPhone as follows:
- Go to Settings/Notifications
- Scroll down to the bottom, the last section is Government Alerts
- Activate as many of the alerts as you would like If someone out there has other than an iPhone and would like to share how you enable these alerts, please let me know.

3. Other

a. FI-Ready – this is our Fox Island Emergency Prep website

b. Have a radio(preferably with backup power) for news updates on
88.5FM (KNKX-NPR),
94.9FM (KUOW),
97.3FM (KiRO) or
97.7FM/1000AM (KNWN)

c. For your Block, some of our BCs have used the Signal App if they have a mix of Apple and Android phones in the area. Currently we cannot create a messages group of mixed phones. Signal is one way around this, and it’s free.

Family Communications Plan
Probably one of the worst things that could happen to any of us is to be separated from our family in an emergency. Compounding that would be not knowing how to reach them and to get reunited.

We suggest the following:
a. Figure out how to reach each member (phone/radio/school etc.)
b. Using the attached form, create a meeting place (suggest one for on-island and one for off-island) and list contact numbers for everyone. In an emergency you may not have your phone available to you with your contact lists. Make sure every family member has a copy, and perhaps put copies in your cars as well.

Why list an out-of-state contact?
Many emergencies result in state or area-wide communication outages, and a friend or family member farther away might be able to act as a communications relay for messages.

Useful Links
Habitat for Humanity has a good section on family communications in a disaster.
https://www.habitat.org/our-work/disaster-response/disaster-preparedness-homeowners/family-communications-plan 

Last modified on: 3/6/2025

Download: Prepare In A Year 2025 - January