It’s Severe Weather Awareness Week, and day four brings the topic of family preparedness.

Adair and Guthrie County Emergency Management Coordinator Bob Kempf says that making sure you and your family are prepared and knows what to do after receiving weather alerts is the next big step to staying safe. He adds that individuals and households should know what the plan is if severe weather rolls through the area, and what things may be important to have if something happens to your property or loved ones. He mentions that records of insurance and financials are something to have in case they’re needed, along with numbers of people that may need to be contacted.

Kempf tells Raccoon Valley Radio of another plan that households should put in place.

“That’s called a communications plan. ‘How are we going to communicate with each other?’ One of the things that people don’t realize a lot of times is that cell phones do not work real well sometimes during a storm, and especially after the storm, because so many people are sending pictures and making phone calls and things like that. Sometimes the better thing to do, which actually works better, is to text each other, because text messages don’t take up the same amount of bandwidth within the cellular system and they have a tendency to go through better.”

Kempf advises that having a relative that lives outside of the area as a first contact can be helpful, because it may be easier to get in touch with them, than it is to get in touch with other household members.