It is so important to prepare your home for any emergency natural or accidental. After your home has been ruined by fire or water damage is too late to think about preparing for a disaster. Things can happen inside or outside of your family. Take time to prepare and protect your family and your belongings from the chaos and confusion that comes from devastation.
There are several things that you can do within your home to start protecting and preparing for the worst. First let’s start by talking about the turmoil fire damage can create when it wreaks havoc in your home. Then how you can prevent or eliminate the amount of damage done to your home if a fire does happen. Fires are responsible in excess of five thousand people a year here in the United States alone. Most of the deaths that arise from fires within the home come not from burns but from breathing in the smoke and harmful gasses that are released in a house fire.
Ways to prevent a fire in your home start first with common sense. Most fires within the home are accidental and begin in the kitchen area of a home. They are not caused by failure from the mechanics of the stove it is from a human slip-up. Use caution whenever you are cooking. Never leave anything on the stove unsupervised. It only takes milliseconds for fire to ravage your home. Grease can splatter and ignite a fire so fast. Attended a fire extinguisher could be used to put out flames where as if left unattended by the time you get back to the kitchen fire damage will have already spread throughout more of your home than just the kitchen.
It is also important to put fire and smoke detectors in every room on every level of your home. The faster a fire is responded to the better the chances to minimize any fire damage and water damage from putting the fire out.
It is also important to plan for a severe natural disaster. You can keep your family safe by first staying informed about the conditions in your area. This is especially true if you live in an area where extreme weather is normal for you. Tornadoes, floods, snow and ice, earthquakes, hurricanes and wild fires are not be able to be planned out but how you react to them can be.
Make sure your home and structures on your property meet requirements for your area. If you live in an area prone to high winds make sure your home is built to withstand them. If you are in an area that usually has an intense rainy season prepare by inspecting your roof and the trees on your property. Fill in any areas with wear with roof tar and keep shingles intact to prevent roof collapse. Keep trees trimmed so that dead branches are not left hanging and that large branches do not hand directly over your home.
Keep an emergency kit with preparations for at least three days stocked and accessible incase severe weather sneaks up on you. This should include things such as food, water, battery operated lights and communication devices, band-aids and blankets. These things are considered the basic necessities to have on hand to keep you alive until help arrives for you.
It is also important if you have time to clear an inside room of furniture, knick knacks and other loose variables. This will prevent flying debris that can cause injury. It is important to seek shelter inside the room that you have created this safe environment. If possible this room should be an inside room without windows.
You never know for sure when a disaster could strike so the best plan is to always be prepared and use common sense to cut down on preventable accidents. It is important to make sure you keep insurance up to date so that is something unexpected happens you can recover and get your life back on track as quickly as possible. Keep an updated list of personal possessions on file somewhere other than your home so that if a disaster takes hold you will still have an account of the items that were in your home.