Family SHTF Rendezvous Plan

[Braaiinns]

I'm currently working on my SHTF plan and I've come across something that I haven't seen discussed in depth here (at least I couldn't find the relevant topics).

Scenario:
-The SHTF on a typical workday. You're at your job, your significant other is at their job. Your kids/parents/siblings/grandmother are scattered throughout the city (like many typical families)

Questions:
-If standard communications are available, how and where does everyone check in and make their intentions clear?
-How does each person know what to do depending on the situation?
-If you have scenario specific plans, how you do ensure that each person reads the situation the same way and executes the same plan?
-How do you plan for school age children who may not be able to walk/cab/bus to the rendezvous destination?
-Do you have backup plans predefined? (eg If no one is at rendezvous point A at 12:00 or you can not make the rendezvous by that time go to rendezvous point B)

Assumptions:
-It's likely not possible to drive around and pick everyone up due to gridlock
-It might be possible to pick one person up IF they are nearby (ie: mom gets Sally at preschool, dad gets Billy at middle school since they are near the office)
-Communications could be in any combo of the following conditions:
a) No cell phone network or they don't carry a mobile phone
b) No landlines or payphones available
c) Telephones are functioning normally
-Everyone has a copy of this plan in their pocket/wallet/purse/backpack
-The goal is to get everyone 'home', hopefully before nightfall
-The plan should be clear for everyone who is old enough to be left on their own

Example plans would be fantastic.

[shrimpwd]

Currently, I do not have any set plans, but!
My siblings (13 & 14) are home schooled. I am their teacher on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Mom is teacher Monday and Tuesday. That covers nearly all of the people, aside from my stepfather. He is currently out of work, so more than likely here as well. For the moment, I think the Rendezvous Plan is 'meet out at the shop, unless it's on fire/fallen down/whatever'?

Once people start finding reasons to leave the house, I'll need to work on the plans a bit, but for now, pretty simple. (Simple means not tested, so really it's crazy and insane)

[Blacksmith]

Everyone goes home and the wife picks up the kids. See how easy that is?

Gridlock?

A got a funny picture in my head of gridlock in a county with a population density of 65 people per square mile. Now on Saturdays when the Farmer's Market is running in the late Summer and Fall the parking gets real tight, sometimes you have to walk over a block from your parking space. But not if you go early and avoid the tourists. Not quite Chicago with their 12.5K/m.

[yale]

If I'm at work then the car is with me so my Girlfriend and the cats are bugging in until I get home. Gridlock? Who cares? When I get home then I get home. If traffic is gridlocked I can stay at work and wait until the roads clear some or I can sit in the traffic with everyone else. If normal communications are up then I check in with home via my cellphone like always. If cell service is down, Girlfriend and I are both ham radio ops and I can hit the house via repeater or even simplex from work. We do it regularly. All she has to do is turn on the ham radio and scan the usual freqs we use.
I don't spend a bunch of time worrying about this like some people do.

[amiready]

My children have a set of options depending on what area of town is affected. Mind you they are older (youngest in junior high). They know to get to one of the safe homes with people we trust who are also preppers. If comm is down, I will get to each of the locations to link up with them when I have the ability. These other families know that their family is welcome to show up at my house if it is inside the safe zone.

[Geardo]

I have a plan.
A few points in my plan that others might be interested in;
I keep a set of FRG radios with batteies in each vehicle. Our predetermined freqs are with them. They don't have great range but they can help to find family members or avoid missing each other once your in the general area.
next, We have contact numbers for persons out side our area to leave messages with. When local networks are swamped, long distance will sometimes work.
The card with this information on it that everyone has also has a number to the local Red Cross. A message can be left there, so others can figure out the Ws.
We also will leave a writen message at the places we start from so the information can be passed along if some one shows up looking. We also have a prearranged spot to hide a writen message at the house (but not attached to the house) so others will know where we went and what we are doing.

Just some ideas you may find useful.

[allofthemonkeys]

At the moment it is just me and my wife, and we both are in college. The plan is to meet up at our car where my GHB is. If traffic is bad, and it always is at my school, we will walk out. There is a park close to where my Dad works and we can meet up with him or just go to our place or my parents. They are the same distance.

[Famine]

I don't spend a bunch of time worrying about this like some people do.

I'm glad you have a plan worked out for this, however some people don't and are using this thread as a discussion area for that purpose.

[Robinsons Treehouse]

This might be a bit off topic but I highly suggest you get a 'MagicJack' for each family member. No I don't work for them, but you can set them up for an out of state telephone number, and they plug into any laptop or computer. As long as you have internet access (and since we live in California there is wireless access almost everywhere) you pop it into your laptop and all call a prearranged number, long distance calls are always the last numbers to go down in case of telephone breakdown. We all will check in and give our location and I will decide the Plan # we are going to follow, we are true believers in backup plans for the backup plan. Just so you know, cell phone is our first option, but one of the backups is the MagicJack (costs like $20 a year).

[Sealegs]

(Since I work with disaster contingency I am well into the nerd cave when it comes to this.)

The sad truth is "the plan can never be more advanced than the commitment to contingency planning of the least interested part." Meaning I can make a perfect plan but if my wife will not learn it and go through it, it will likely break down to the smallest common denominator anyway.

My planning is larger than what my wife and kids bother to learn and find out about, so. Will try to answer your questions from the standpoint of my own plans though.

On coms:
First try cell. Then text, then try wireless and send an email. Then if land lines are available or you get through at all on the cell, call home and leave a situation report on the answering machine. This might be the only reason I still have an answering machine that kicks in after about 30 signals..

On what to do:
Get the kids, get home. Smallest common denominator. If the home area somehow is demolished, get kids, move to location B. If B is unavailable, C etc. I will not try to guess if my wife or parents have picked up the kids before me, until we hear otherwise everyone is heading for the kids. If the kids are not at school/daycare, move to location A.
It has to be really simple, advanced flowcharts are worthless without practicing. Getting the wife and kids to practice anything but cooking, xbox etc can be a challenge.

Scenario specific:
The smallest common denominator for disasters are: Bug in or bug out? Ie, is the area secure enough to remain, will you be better off "sitting or hitting". So for scenario specificness I only make a difference for scale. If the house is destroyed but not the are at large, move to location B (parents house) abt. 1.5km away. Barring that you go to C which is staging point for bug out route A. We have a fire evacuation plan, etc but for a "get home" scenario those play into this.

On kids:
Kids are our responsibility. We get them, if we cannot find them and no proof of pickup can be found, go to "missing person" plan and look for them. Plan as far as kids know: Stay put, go with the people you are allowed to go with. If moved involuntarily, leave a trace or message.

Backup plans are as simple as possible. Only place to go first, second third etc.

The only plan we carry is a laminated card (With all phone numbers, contact info and numbers that usually reside in cell phones nowadays.) taped under the inner sole of a shoe. I made about 30 so I put them in all the shoes.

My plan is more like a risk assessment P.M. so including it would be lengthy and in Swedish. But since I have to break it down to simple simple, I go with range and geography. These are the things that make your decisions for you. How far are you and what is the terrain? How far reaching is the disaster/accident and what is the geographic risk ratio as a result?

For instance:
Flood: Bugging home.
Myself: Crossing 1 of 4 possible bridges, required for BH [Bugging Home]. Possible miss of rendezvous is high since bridges might be affected where I am at.
Wife: Crossing 1 out of 2 bridges, unlikely they will be affected enough to slow her down. She could swim it and be at the kids school, on foot, in 30min.
Kids: School, unaffected by flooding due to terrain.
Home: Unaffected, bugging out unlikely in case of flood.
Check flood supplies 1 in 3 years due to shelf life of some items. (just my example´and food is not included in my flood supplies.)

[Braaiinns]

There is some excellent stuff here. I'll have to let it stew for a little while and report back. Thanks to everyone that has contributed so far!

[Nailz]

While I don't have a set-in-stone plan with the family (Wife, Son 5, Daughter 1), we have discussed the fact that most of the time when a regional incident has occurred, it is local phone lines that become overwhelmed. Because of this, we plan on either Texting or calling out of town relatives and give them updates on our situation. Often, long-distance calling is possible when local isn't.

As far as gridlock, I think the poster is referring to the panic gridlock of get home or get out traffic, not your usual '5 o'clock' traffic. For this, I don't think waiting around at the office is going to fix it. I'm pretty sure that most would agree that getting to their loved ones is of upmost importance. I have toyed with the idea of having a sealing smaller manila envelope with directions that are laminated for all family members to tear into should the need arise. This way, even if they forget any or all of your boring pre-SHTF tutorial you dragged them all through, they can still operate within the 'plan' as it were.

I too would love some ideas from the other family heads here.

PS~ The info under the sole idea is freaking genius.

[cheekymcgee]

My family and I have discussed this a bit. Our plan is based around an earthquake.

My parents house is our go-to place. That's where the vast majority of our supplies are. Their house is between my work and my wife's work. 4mi from me and 2.5mi from her. Our fall-back position would be my place but, it's tiny and we don't have room to store much. Maybe 3 days worth of supplies at most. It would be used only as a last resort.

Our plan assumes that all communication is down and we automatically know where to go. Thankfully it's close enough that we can get there on foot if all the roads are blocked. We're both carrying GHBs in our cars so we're good to go as far as that's concerned. We're both also carrying walkie-talkies but, I doubt they'll do us much good in this area with so many buildings. That's about as far as we've planned. We don't have kids yet, so no worries there. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

[huntingohio]

Im fortunate enough that my kids are at gmas, which is only 3 apartments from mine. So they can baracade themselves in my house until i get home. The rest of my family is supposed to stow what they can in there cars [mostly trucks and vans] and meet at my AO. Im the most rural of any of them, and if SHTF i imagine a lot of my neighbors leaving so wed have extra housing.

[Kookricookery]

A lot of good thinking here. Thanks, folks, for filling in the mental gaps for me.
Our oldest is at college about 36 miles away and we have a cold weather supply kit in her locker. She will have to follow her own plan, pre-determined, until we see what the problem is. From school to her grandmothers, close by.
Also we have put a 6 day small backpack kit together for the new Chihuahua our youngest has, there's some shivering there in the cold to really address. The route from our high school kids point-to-home overlaps the route we would take to get her ourselves, either driving or walking.

Take Care All,
Mark

[California]

Great ideas! We are currently trying to plan our SHTF situation. In most of the cases we would be bunking down at home. If separated, then we would initially meet at home, or go to the parents house a few blocks over. We have a 2 year old and another one on the way, so I don't imagine that I would be able to do much more in a SHTF situation other than protecting against raiders. Does anyone have any ideas on what would be most affective to protect ones home and family, in the event of Bugging In? Besides the obvious guns and ammunition.

[Neville]

We're meeting at a local store... It's the mid-point between our jobs. I believe it will be a safe haven. It's a moderately priced hardware store.

It looks like we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDgoZkrmVc8