Make emergency plans

A home emergency plan lets each member of a household know what to do in an emergency and how to be prepared in advance.

Having a home emergency plan helps alleviate fears about potential emergencies and makes actual emergency situations less stressful while saving precious time.

Make sure your whare/home emergency plan lines up with emergency plans for your mahi/work, kura/school and other places where you spend a lot of time. You should also make sure it lines up with your community response plans or community resilience plans. Different communities have different response plans.

• Contact your local Civil Defence Emergency Management Group to find out about your community’s response plan.

How to make a whare/home emergency plan

You can make a home emergency plan online on the Get Ready website, or by following the instructions below.

• Write down the names of everyone in your household and their contact details.
• Decide where you will go in case you have to evacuate or can’t get home.
  • Plan and mark evacuation routes on a map. Plan several evacuation routes in case certain roads are blocked, closed, and/or put you in further danger.
  • Discuss and write down your places to go:
    • Right outside your whare/home, in case of a sudden emergency (e.g. fire).
    • A safe location away from your immediate area which you can reach from home by walking. If you live near the coast, make sure it is not in a tsunami evacuation zone. Go here in case of a sudden emergency (e.g. flash flood or tsunami) or if you can’t get home.
    • Out of town, to stay during or after an emergency. Go here when you have time to evacuate from your neighbourhood (e.g. for a flood) or if you can’t get back to your neighbourhood. This place can be a relative or friend’s home, or a hotel, motel or campground you are familiar with.
    • A meeting place if you can’t get home. It might be a kura/school, a friend’s home or with whānau/family.
  • Think about people who might need your help in an emergency (e.g. elderly and disabled people, single parents with young children, people who are new to the area, people who live on their own, and others who might need help in the neighbourhood).
    • Introduce yourself and save their contact phone numbers.
    • Discuss what they may need and how you and others can help them.
    • See Disabled people and people with special requirements for more information.
  • Pick two contacts outside your neighbourhood to leave a message with if you can’t contact each other:
    • A friend or relative who will be your household’s primary contact.
    • A friend or relative who will be your household’s alternative contact.
    • Tell these contacts that you will call or text them in an emergency. Make sure they have all of your contact numbers. In an emergency, they will need to know:
      • Where you are.
      • What happened.
      • How to reach you.
    • All adults and children in your household should know the primary and alternative contacts’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and how to leave this emergency information in a text message or voicemail. For small children, write the names and numbers on a card and keep it in their school/daycare bag.
  • Decide on emergency contacts for each family member and ensure these are saved in their phones. Think about who you might need to contact for information or help in an emergency. Write down important contact details. Try filling out this table:

• Write down where your emergency supplies are at home. Make sure everyone knows where these are. They don’t all need to be in one place, but you might have to find them in the dark. This includes any medication, and where it is stored, in case you need to evacuate.
• Write down how and when to turn off the water, electricity and gas at the main switches or valves at home.
  • Make sure everyone in the household can turn these off – even in the dark.
  • If you need them, make sure that you have necessary tools in an obvious, weather-tight place close to the gas and water shut-off valves.
  • Only turn these off if you suspect a leak or damaged lines or if you are instructed to do so by your utility provider, local Civil Defence Emergency Management Group or other local authority. If you turn the mains gas off, you will need a professional to turn it back on.
  • Place a tag on shut-off valves to make them easier to identify.

Make a personal wāhi mahi/workplace emergency plan

In an emergency, you can be stuck at mahi/work, without transport home. Make a personal wāhi mahi / workplace emergency plan so you know who to contact at mahi/work in an emergency and have a plan to get home safely.

You can find a personal workplace emergency plan template on getready.govt.nz.

It is also a good idea to have some emergency supplies at mahi/work in case you have to wait to travel home.

If you run a business, you should make sure all your staff members have a Personal Workplace Emergency Plan.

Emergency planning for businesses

An emergency plan is a health and safety requirement for all wāhi mahi / workplaces. Not having one is a big risk for your business and the people in it. An emergency plan details what you and your colleagues will do when a disaster strikes to keep yourselves and your customers safe.

Being prepared for an emergency can:

• save lives and prevent harm,
• help businesses to continue trading through hardship,
• give staff and owners confidence,
• protect equipment and premises,
• quickly get businesses running again.

Information about emergency planning for businesses is available on business.govt.nz.

It is also important that businesses have a business continuity plan in place. A business continuity plan identifies how your business can keep its essential functions up and running following an emergency.

Emergency planning for early learning services and kura/schools

Early learning services and kura should have an emergency management plan for all hazards they may face, especially for sudden impact hazards where children, students and staff have to act quickly, e.g., earthquake, tsunami, fire, violent threat.

The Ministry of Education provides guidance for kura/schools to plan and prepare for emergencies and traumatic incidents:

• Early learning services emergency and traumatic incident guidance
• Schools (years 0-13) emergency and traumatic incident guidance

There is also a Best Practice Guide specifically targeted at early learning services.

Early learning services and kura/schools should have plans for excursions and education outside of the classroom (EOTC) activities. An emergency may happen when children, students and staff are outside of the early learning service or kura/school grounds, and it is important that there are plans in place for these scenarios.

Emergency plans should detail arrangements for caring for children and students including information to help reunite them with their parents, legal guardians, or approved alternate caregiver in a safe and timely manner.

Make an early learning service or kura/school emergency plan as a parent or guardian

Find out about your children’s kura/school’s emergency plan and talk to your children about it. Do they know what to do if there is an emergency? Have their teachers discussed it?

Parents and guardians need to know all emergency procedures in advance, especially the safe locations and whānau/family reunification procedures.

Find out if the kura/school’s emergency plan requires you to pick up your children from a safe location after the “all-clear” is given.

• Plan to collect your children by foot or bicycle, if possible. Routes to and from schools may be jammed. Telephone lines during an emergency may be overloaded.
• Ensure emergency contact details held by the early learning service or kura/school are up to date.
• Parents and guardians should provide multiple pre-approved emergency contacts. Decide who will pick up your children if you can’t get to them and provide their name to the school. Be sure that parent and emergency contact information is updated at the beginning of each year as a minimum, and that parents notify the early learning service and/or kura/school of any changes during the year. Children can only be released to a person identified by the parent or usual caregiver as approved to uplift that child.

Marae preparedness planning enhances resilience and safety of marae, taonga and iwi, assisting te hau kāinga (the people of the marae) and te hapori (the wider community) to understand and manage their risks.

A marae emergency preparedness plan will identify the potential hazards, people from the marae who have specialist skills (such as first aid), and a list of items that will be required to ensure the marae is adequately prepared.

Work through the marae emergency preparedness plan to work out what your marae will do.

One of the best ways to prepare for emergencies is by getting together with other people in your community and discussing how you all plan to respond to events.

Street-level plans encourage neighbours to build their own networks and identify people who may need extra support in an emergency. Talk to people close to where you live and find out what’s already in place.

Your community may already have groups of people or networks that have their own plans and will have a role in bringing different people together. Most communities have a Civil Defence Centre or a community hub, where locals can come together during and after an emergency. In times of need, these will be opened and run by communities. Contact your local Civil Defence Emergency Management Group to find out how you can volunteer.

There may also be local voluntary, church and sports groups, kura/schools, marae, and service organisations. Make contact with them and find out what they are doing.

Volunteering New Zealand and Neighbourhood Support Groups provide other opportunities to volunteer and have contacts to groups that may have existing community plans.

Getting to know your neighbours has other benefits, too. You can share contact details and find out what resources and skills you can share with each other. Try to keep it low-stress and low-expectation: tell people it’s about doing what you can to support each other.