What Your Plan Should Include

The following items are essential to your evacuation plan:

         A map of the escape routes for each room in your home. Give each person the map and make sure they've memorized it. Review it every couple months to keep it fresh in their head. Diagram every room in the house and map at least two ways out of the house from each location. Windows count as escape routes as long as they can be opened or broken in the event of an emergency. Make sure to clear or cover the bottom edge of a window you have to break to avoid getting cut on the broken glass.
         For homes with more than one story, you're going to need fire escape ladders in each of the bedrooms. Don't end up like the guy who kept a ladder in just his room and told the kids to rendezvous there. The fire was so intense the kids couldn't make it to his room and ended up burning to death. I know I've just painted a gruesome picture, but I want you to know what the result of not having a ladder in each room can be.
         The escape plan should lay out when and when not to grab the 72-hour bags. If there's a raging fire or a rumbling earthquake, every second counts. You need to get out of the house first, then worry about what supplies you're going to need. You don't want someone opening a door to go after the supply kits only to find there's an inferno on the other side of the door.
         Designate an outside meeting place where you'll rendezvous once you've made it out of the house. All family members should meet there once they've made their escape.

Here's a tip I haven't seen anywhere else. Get loud air horns (the canned air horns work great for this) and keep them at the bedside of each member of the house. That way, at the first sign of trouble, the person who notices it can blow their air horn, alerting everyone in the house that there's a problem.

If you want to get fancy, set up a code system using the air horns so the person who notices the problem can alert everyone as to what the issue is. A continuous blast can mean there's a fire; a series of short blasts can mean there's a flood and so on.

I've got younger children in my home, so I've kept my system simple. If the kids wake up and hear a continuous blast, it means they need to exit the house through their windows, which they've all been trained to do. If they hear a series of short blasts, it means they need to exit through their assigned door and meet at the rendezvous point.

They've been taught to lay on the horn when there's an issue until I wake up. Imagine my surprise when my daughter's horn went off in the middle of the night and I grabbed my gun and rushed to her room—only to find she'd heard something under her bed. Something I had to search for at 2 AM and never found. Oh well, better safe than sorry.

You may need to adjust your plan to accommodate the people living in your house. The best plan is the one that works for you.