Thursday, April 5, 2012

Do You Have a Home Evacuation Plan?

On Monday we have Katie (our counselor from OA&FS) coming to our house for our first home visit. Needless to say, we've been cleaning up like freaks and trying to make sure everything's in tip-top shape! That giant hole our cats clawed out of the sofa? All patched up :)

In addition to just making sure we've cleaned everything up, the agency prepared us by sending along the checklist of things they have to verify for legal reasons. Most are common sense items, such as:
  • The home has safe drinking water.
  • Smoke alarms are in working order and located in every room in which a child sleeps.
  • Swimming pools, wading pools, hot tubs, and other water hazards are inaccessible to children.
All those requirements? We're golden. We had to do a little bit of work for some of them (we didn't actually have a fire extinguisher, for instance), but they generally all made sense. One of them really came out of nowhere, though:
  • The home has a posted home evacuation plan. It will be shared with the child or young adult at the time of placement and will be practiced at least one time every 6 months.
I mean... really? Because it's so difficult to just walk out the door? And we're definitely going to make our newborn do fire drills every six months - I'm sure they'll be really useful. Anyway, this is when it's useful that I'm married to a civil engineer. Brian and CAD to the rescue!

He missed a closet in the bedroom...

I can rest easy now that I know where to go in case of emergency!

3 comments:

  1. That's a ridiculous requirement, but I do love that Brian rose to the occasion and created a genuine evac plan in CAD.
    I suppose now Brian will have to wait until after the baby has been placed to build his water feature.
    - Tatiana

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  2. I love it! Way to go Brian. It's good to know all the skills you acquired in our completely worthless CADD class in college are being put to good use. :)

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  3. Heh I still want to do a water feature... even though the cats would just play in it.

    Haha I had totally forgotten about that class until now! Those trips over to East Campus were painful and already knowing how to use AutoCAD really just meant it was all about going through the motions and then reading stuff online or IM-ing friends from my computer in class. If only work could be that easy... :)

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