Emergency Preparedness for Homeowners: Steps to take to prevent or lessen damage during disasters
Home emergency preparedness means different things for different people. It will depend on where you live and what risk factors are most prevalent in your area. Understanding these factors and knowing how to prepare for them can make a massive difference in how your family is impacted by a storm.
In this article, we take a look at what you can do preventatively to avoid major issues. Remember that all of these recommendations are designed with two primary goals in mind:
- Prevent damage whenever it’s possible
- Reduce harm when damage is unavoidable
Everything we’re about to describe is designed to support both outcomes.
Begin with a Risk Assessment
A risk assessment simply involves reviewing possible outcomes that are specific to your area. For example, in some communities, mine subsidence is a risk factor. Others are more likely to experience forest fires, tornadoes, flooding, or hurricane winds.
Remember that the risk factors relevant to your home may change over time. We now live in an age where wildfires are increasingly more prevalent than they used to be, and flash floods are increasingly common due to unpredictable, climate-related weather patterns.
These factors combine to create a situation in which it is important to routinely review what risks are most relevant to your household.
Your Home May Have Its Own Risk Factors
It’s also important to take a look at what’s happening on your property specifically.
For example, if you have an old roof, that could result in water intrusion even if you don’t live in an area with heavy rainfall. Or maybe you have a basement. In that case, it’s important to routinely monitor for the possibility of flooding. Even if you don’t get much precipitation, you could still experience groundwater intrusion at any point.
Do you have old trees on your property? That’s an additional risk factor to keep an eye on.
The goal is not to stress about every branch within eyesight. It’s to get better at anticipating potential outcomes and taking reasonable precautions to prevent them.
A half-dead maple tree, for example, could cost $2,000 to cut down, but it might save you $30,000 in structural repairs.
Damage Prevention on a Budget
We referenced the relative affordability of cutting down a tree versus letting it hit your house. That’s great in theory, but if you add up all of the potential preventative repairs, you could wind up with a staggering bill. Waterproofing a basement, replacing an old roof, cutting down trees, cleaning out gutters regularly—these could all add up to a mid-five-figure price tag, despite the fact that you are not actually experiencing problems to begin with.
That’s not the approach we’re recommending precisely. It’s absolutely suitable to determine your budget and make sensible repairs cautiously.
For example, let’s say you only have $1,000 to spend on disaster prevention. That’s not enough for anything structurally significant, but you can use that money to clean out your gutters, cut down larger tree limbs, replace missing shingles, and possibly do some light landscaping to reduce the risk of water intrusion.
Doing something is often better than doing nothing. Despite what you see on HGTV, most people don’t do a lot of home repairs all at once. It’s an incremental process that’s very budget-dependent.
Utility-Related Safety
It’s also important to know how to manage utilities in the event of an emergency. For example:
- Gas
- Electric
- Water
You don’t necessarily need to do any home upgrades to make these systems more manageable. You just need to know how to use them safely.
If there’s structural damage that results in compromised electrical lines, for example, you want to know how to turn off your breakers. If a pipe bursts in extreme cold, you want to know how to shut off your water to prevent flooding. And if there’s damage to your gas line, you need to know how to shut off the natural gas supply.
Here’s the good news: all of these considerations are very manageable and can be learned in minutes.
Disaster Readiness Plan
Finally, it’s also important to have a disaster readiness plan for any scenario.
Part of this will involve having basic food and water supplies on hand, ideally stored in a storm-safe location like a basement area. Dry, non-perishable foods can be an asset in a storm event that keeps you in the house for a prolonged period of time.
You should also have evacuation plans that your entire family is familiar with. The idea is not to live in fear, but simply to be ready for the possibility of an emergency.
If there is damage to your home, that’s manageable. At AMH, we specialize in working directly with insurance companies to help make things as easy as possible. Your job is to stay safe. We can handle the rest.
