When Disaster Strikes, Your Family Is the First Response Team.
Hurricanes, wildfires, power outages, pandemics, and other emergencies can change your family's situation in minutes. BEAST turns where you live, who's in your home, and what you have into a simple family emergency plan.
BEAST: Build·Event·Assessment·Strategy·Tactics
Prepare before it happens. Understand what changed. Decide what your family should do next.
ZIP only. Never your street address.
See How BEAST Works
Readiness
Five stages. One family plan.
BEAST is how the pros think in a real emergency — turned into plain steps any family can follow. Know what you have. Know what's coming. Know how it hits your family. Pick your plan. Do the steps.
Prepare for what is likely, then build for what is possible.
A good plan starts with where you live. BEAST looks at what usually happens in your area — and what you tell us about your family — to show you what to plan for first. Enter your ZIP above to see your Family Risk Brief here.
The hazard may be regional. The impact is personal.
The same extended power outage, four very different nights. Hover or tap each household to see what changes first for them.
Same outage. Four different first moves. That is why BEAST plans start with your household, not a generic checklist. Now tap what applies to your household:
The storm is only the first problem.
Most families plan for the event. The disruption that actually tests them arrives afterward, one domino at a time. Tap any step to see the move that softens it.
Know what is covered and what still needs work.
BEAST breaks readiness into five parts and scores each one. Do small actions, fix the biggest gap first, and watch your family plan grow stronger.
| Capability | Score | Suggested action | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Know | 70 | Turn on local emergency alerts | |
| Decide | 35 | Pick two family meeting places | |
| Supply | 45 | Add a three-day water reserve | |
| Coordinate | 55 | Confirm an out-of-area contact | |
| Practice | 20 | Run the first decision drill |
Choose a nearby meeting place and one outside your neighborhood. This takes less than five minutes and closes a major family-separation gap.
When conditions change, know which plan you are using.
Four decisions cover almost every event. Decide them in calm daylight, and the pressure moment becomes a checklist instead of an argument.
Normal → Decision
Stay home with enough water, food, and medicine to get by until things come back on.
"Could your home run for 72 hours with no power and no store runs?"
Build a Stay Plan
Normal → Decision
Move to the safest spot inside your home — fast — when there's no time to leave.
"Can everyone reach your safe room in under sixty seconds — at night, half asleep?"
Choose My Safe Areas
Normal → Decision
Know the sign that says it's time to go, where you'll go, and what you'll take.
"What condition means your family leaves — and who makes the call?"
Build an Evacuation Plan
Normal → Decision
Plan how your family finds each other if you're apart when something happens.
"If phones fail at 3 PM on a school day, where does everyone go?"
Create a Reunification PlanPractice the moment before it becomes real.
Short decision drills help your family think through pressure while there is still time to talk, change the plan, and fill the gaps.
Power Outage · Hour 6
It is 92°F outside. The power has been out for six hours, and the power company no longer says when it will come back. Phone batteries are dropping. One family member's medicine must stay cold.
What is your trigger for leaving home? A trigger is the sign that tells you "it's time." Example: "If the power is still out at dark, we go to Aunt May's."
Start with the next right move, not a giant shopping cart.
Everything in a family kit is cheap and easy to find. The value is not the gear — it is having it gathered, working, and where everyone can find it.
Tonight
- Choose meeting places
- Select an out-of-area contact
- Save critical phone numbers
- Find the safest room
- Turn on official alerts
This Weekend
- Store initial water and food
- Gather medications and documents
- Build basic home and vehicle kits
- Test flashlights and backup chargers
- Walk the evacuation route
This Month
- Build up to seven days of supplies
- Add a backup way to cook and stay clean
- Review insurance and photograph property
- Plan for power-dependent needs
- Run a family drill
Stronger Over Time
- Add backups of the basics
- Work toward fourteen days of supplies
- Swap out food and water before it expires
- Grow the circle of people who can help
- Review the plan every season
Your private Family Operations Center.
Keep the plan, contacts, jobs, and supplies in one place. When something happens, you shouldn't have to dig through old texts to find the plan.
Privacy: BEAST uses your ZIP code for regional planning by default. A precise address is only requested when a feature truly requires it, with an explanation and a skip option. Your plan lives on your device.
Help is a system. Systems take time.
Help doesn't go straight from a warehouse to your front door. It moves through roads, trucks, fuel, and people — and each one can slow it down. Your family plan covers you until it arrives.
Conditions change for a whole region at once — not just your street.
Fire, police, and medical crews take the most life-threatening calls first.
Mutual aid, the National Guard, and state logistics spin up — this takes hours to days.
Bottleneck: staffing & assessmentSupplies, crews, and equipment start traveling — often from other states.
Bottleneck: distance & fuelResources concentrate at distribution points before they fan out.
Blocked roads, fuel supply, communications, and damaged infrastructure set the pace.
Bottleneck: roads & communicationsPoints of distribution, shelters, and local partners hand off to neighborhoods.
Your plan covers the gap between step 1 and step 8 — that gap is measured in days, not hours.
This is how response logistics work everywhere, run by people working as fast as conditions allow. The plan is not a substitute for help — it is what carries your family until help arrives.
Built from real response experience. Designed for real family life.
BEAST comes from more than twenty years of real emergency response — hurricanes, Ebola, COVID, and over 100 missions and exercises. The lesson never changes: plans fail when families wait too long to decide what they'll do.
BEAST brings that thinking home — without turning your house into a command post.
More than two decades in emergency response and medical logistics
Experience supporting more than 100 response missions and exercises
Work across hurricanes, outbreaks, complex logistics, and public health emergencies
Training experience with state, territorial, and response partners
He ran emergency supplies and logistics through Katrina, Ebola, and COVID. BEAST is that experience, brought home.
Give your family a plan before the pressure arrives.
Start with your location. Add what makes your household different. Leave with a clear list of what to decide, what to gather, and what to practice.