Anyone who knows me knows I have always been a planner. Whether figuring out how to afford a major purchase, ensuring all bases were covered for a 20-day cruise vacation, or writing and creating a household emergency plan, I loved “getting ready.” Part of the fun for me was the preparation.
On 9/11, I was on a plane traveling from Denver back to my home in Atlanta. I had a 6:30 AM flight leaving Denver (8:30 on the East Coast). We took off and headed east, but somewhere over Kansas, the pilot said the FAA required all flights to land ASAP and at the nearest airport. He continued to say there had been a hijacking, and the FAA wanted to be sure there were no other possible hijackings in progress. By this time, the first and second planes had already hit the Twin Towers, the third plane had hit the Pentagon, and the last plane had crashed in Shanksville, PA.
Our plane was diverted to Tulsa, OK, since the Kansas City Airport was already at capacity. Upon landing, I entered the airport and found everyone congregating around the TVs in the bar beside my gate. I finally saw what had been happening on the ground while we were flying to Atlanta. I could not believe my eyes.
Being an employee in the airline industry at that time, I quickly realized that getting home that day would be a challenge. I checked with the staff at my gate, and they said there might be flights sometime tomorrow. They recommended I get a hotel room for the night. I spent the next three days alone in a hotel room, repeatedly watching the videos. I was calling co-workers to get an update on when flights would begin again, and they were all trying to get me a way home.
Even with all this help, I was in Tulsa for three nights, and getting on a plane was still not a reality, so I rented a car to drive back to Atlanta. I left Friday morning and arrived home on Saturday at about 3 AM. I was never so happy to be home.
While on the drive home, I kept thinking about what my family would have had to go through if the plane I was on had been hijacked and crashed. First, they all lived in Connecticut, and I lived in Atlanta. They had no access to my car or home and would have had no idea how to begin closing out my life. It would have also required a family member to spend time in my home in Atlanta. Since they all had jobs, it would have been a terrible burden.
A second issue I was thinking about on the drive to Atlanta was how I could apply what I had learned from working on the teams putting together corporate emergency plans over the years (in several different industries). I kept trying to figure out how to prepare my household emergency plan in case something happened to me. The problem with how I had been taught to do a corporate plan was to focus on what could happen and then have a plan to recover from the results of each specific event. When looking at a terrorist attack, I kept falling short of how to recover. Since one would never know when a terrorist attack would happen (no warning) and never know what form the attack would take (recovery from a defined event), it was hard to know what to put in place to be ready.
Once back in Atlanta, I began researching ways to write a family emergency plan, but little to no information was available. I couldn’t figure out how to convert the process I had learned for writing a corporate emergency plan until I read an article comparing about 20 corporate disasters and it outlined if the company had a disaster plan, how long it took to recover, and what they had lost because of the disaster. This one article was the final breakthrough, and I created the approach I documented in my book, YOUR LIFE, Interrupted, published in 2008. Instead of focusing on every disaster that might happen, YOUR LIFE, Interrupted, focused on the one common result of every disaster: loss. The answer was to write a plan addressing what you could lose (and what you would need to do).
Since then, I have been promoting the idea of households writing their plan just in case. Writing your plan is a choice. But it is your family that is impacted if you don’t have one. If you think back to 9/11 and if you had been on one of those planes, would you say that your family is ready?
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