Defend Your Castle: Eleven Tips for Effective Home Security by Gordan Runyan

Author:Gordan Runyan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Crafts, Hobbies & Home, Fitness & Dieting, Home Improvement & Design, Health, Self-Help, How-To & Home Improvements, Security
Publisher: Happy Siege
Published: 2012-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

8. MAKE A FAMILY PLAN

If you have school-aged kids, you’ve almost certainly already told them what to do if they wake up to smoke or fire. You might think about having a similar plan in place for intruders. Of course, you the parent will need to weigh whether making and practicing the plan, all by itself, will be overly traumatic or scary for your children. But you might well decide it’s better to be safe than sorry.

The more thorough you are about analyzing your “home field advantage” above, the better able you’ll be to develop this plan. Here are some hints.

It’s helpful to get a large floor plan of your home. If you own your home, there ought to be blueprints in your paperwork that you can copy. A crude drawing will work fine, though. Use this floor plan in family meetings about home security. You can do this in conjunction with talking about fire escape routes, as well.

Make sure you locate exits and highlight them.

Identify vulnerable areas. Often, our bedrooms are pretty vulnerable, as they normally don’t have their own doorway to exit the home. Also, bedrooms tend to have doors that open into areas that are highly visible. Depending on the access to an exit, you may want the occupant of that vulnerable room to avoid using that sort of door; and, instead hide under the bed or in a closet, etc.

As you plan escape routes and how they will change depending on where an intruder may be, you may also want to think about pre-staging other weapons like pepper spray or an electric shock device at certain convenient locations. However, remember, whatever weapon you deploy like that, the members of your family need to be aware of, and/or know how to deal with it.

Escape should probably be the first, preferred goal. Escape with a cell phone is even better. Wait to call 9-1-1 until you’re safely out of the house, as calling inside may alert the intruder to your location. (Every study available shows the police won’t likely get there before the whole situation has come to its conclusion anyway, so it’s best to call when it’s safest.)

Stress to everyone NOT to call another family member’s cell phone during this crisis. What if they are hiding somewhere inside the house and now you cause their cell phone to ring?

Have a designated meeting location outside the home. It’s great if you can pre-arrange this sort of thing with a trusted neighbor. You can be their meeting place and they can be yours.

Consider having a code word or a short key phrase that will cause your children to know that they have to take action as soon as they hear them. For instance, train them to know that if Mom wakes them up in the middle of the night by whispering “Code Red!” in their ear, they need to snap awake and understand there is an intruder in the house. One Mom I saw had her three-year-old trained so

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.