How to Set Up an Emergency Plan in a Remote Area

When you live a long way from town, the rules for handling an emergency are different. An ambulance that takes 7 minutes in the city can take 30 to 60 minutes to reach a remote farm or mountain home. A power outage that lasts an hour in town can last three days in a hollow after an ice storm. A blizzard, a wildfire, or a downed tree can close the only road in or out for days at a time. None of this means rural living is dangerous. Many of the safest, calmest places in America are far from a city. It does mean a careful emergency plan is more important for a country home than for a city apartment, and that plan is something you build once, write down on paper, and update twice a year.

A good rural emergency plan covers three kinds of trouble. The first is a health emergency, like a fall, a heart attack, a stroke, or a serious cut. The second is a weather emergency, like a long power outage, a winter storm that blocks the road, a tornado, a hurricane, or a wildfire approaching. The third is an infrastructure emergency, like a well pump that fails, a propane tank that runs empty in January, or a phone line that goes down. Each kind needs different supplies and different people on a contact list, and the time to figure out who to call is not at 2 a.m. with the lights out.

This guide walks through the parts of a rural emergency plan in plain English, in the order you should put them together. Set aside a Saturday morning, a clipboard, and a pen. Work through the steps with a spouse, an adult child, or a neighbor if you can. By lunchtime, you will have a written plan, a kit of supplies in one place in the house, and a list of phone numbers taped to the refrigerator. If you live alone, give a copy of the plan to a family member or trusted neighbor so someone else knows what to do if you cannot tell them yourself.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, known as FEMA, runs a free website at ready.gov with checklists and templates that match this guide. The American Red Cross runs a similar set of free tools at redcross.org. Both are US government or non-profit sources and never charge for the materials. Print pages from either site at your local library or send them to a family member to print and mail to you. Paper copies matter; when the power is out, you cannot read a plan on a dead phone.