How to prepare for an earthquake in advance

While the ground is moving you have seconds and very few options. Everything else was settled beforehand: whether the wardrobe stands where it will fall onto the bed, whether there are shoes beside it, whether your child knows where to go when the phones are down, whether your documents are somewhere you can pick up in one movement.

None of this is about stockpiling for the end of the world. It is a handful of decisions, each an evening's work, that keep working for years. What follows is ordered by payoff: first the things that genuinely reduce the chance of injury, then the ones that make the days afterwards survivable.

Most earthquake injuries come not from collapse but from the contents of the room. A tall wardrobe, a shelving unit, a chest of drawers, a fridge, a television on a stand — all of it slides and topples in strong shaking. Anchoring solves the problem outright and costs almost nothing.

The rule is simple: anything taller than it is wide gets a bracket or strap into the wall. Heavy items move from high shelves to low ones. Nothing heavy hangs above a bed or a sofa — no shelves, no framed pictures, no mirrors.

Look separately at the water heater and the boiler: an unsecured heater tears pipes as it goes and becomes a flood or a gas leak. And in the kitchen, catches on cupboard doors keep the crockery from launching itself across the room.

The cheapest measure of all. After a quake the floor is almost certainly covered in broken glass and the lights are almost certainly out. A pair of closed shoes under the bed and a torch in the nightstand prevent most cuts and all groping about in the dark.

A torch, not a phone: the phone is for contacting people, and draining it for light is a poor trade. Keep it where you can reach it without standing up.

The point of the bag is that it gets picked up without thinking. So it is packed once, kept by the door, and not raided "just for now". Plan its contents around several days of self-sufficiency: water, medicines and documents need to last until help is working.

The basics: drinking water and food that keeps and needs no cooking; a first-aid kit with personal and prescription medicines; a torch and spare batteries; a power bank and cable; a whistle; wipes and hygiene items; something warm and something waterproof; cash in small notes; copies of documents; paper and a pen.

The whistle is not a trivial item. Someone trapped under rubble loses their voice within tens of minutes of shouting, while a whistle can be sounded for hours and carries far further.

By the door or in the hallway, not at the back of a cupboard behind everything else. It defeats the purpose if reaching it means going back into the room you are leaving.

A smaller second version is worth keeping in the car and at work — an earthquake finds you where you are, not where your bag is.

After a destructive earthquake documents are needed sooner than people expect: for shelter, payments, insurance, applying for help, moving children. Replacing them at that moment is an ordeal of its own.

Make two sets. Paper copies — passports and ID for everyone in the household, birth certificates, property papers, insurance policy, medical notes on chronic conditions and allergies — in a waterproof bag inside the go-bag. Digital copies in cloud storage, and emailed to yourself as a duplicate, so they can be reached from anyone else's device.

Put a printed contact list in with them. A phone can break or die, and hardly anyone remembers numbers by heart any more.

Communications work badly in the first hours, and decisions cannot wait. So the agreement has to exist beforehand, in words, rather than being left to "we'll work it out".

Pick a meeting point near home — open ground, not under façades or power lines. And a second, further one for when home cannot be reached: friends in another district, a school, some landmark everyone knows.

Nominate a contact outside the region. Local networks saturate first, and it is often easier to reach another city than the flat next door. Everyone reports in to that one person, who collects the information and passes it on.

Talk the school scenario through with children: who collects them and when, what to do if nobody comes, whom to ask. Schools usually have their own procedure — learn it in advance rather than on the day.

After strong shaking the first job indoors is not gathering belongings but ruling out the secondary disaster. A gas leak, or a short circuit in soaked wiring, is more dangerous than the shaking was: fires after earthquakes are a standard pattern, not a rarity.

Find the gas valve, the water stopcock and the main breaker now, in daylight and unhurried. Make sure they can be reached and that any tool they need is next to them. Show all the adults in the household — knowledge that only one person has does not work on the day that person is out.

Older relatives, people with limited mobility, anyone on continuous medication or with a chronic condition need their own plan rather than the general one. Keep a larger margin of medicines, copies of prescriptions in the bag, and a written list of diagnoses and drugs in a pocket rather than only on a phone.

Decide in advance who is responsible for helping that person and who covers if the first person is not there. For anyone who cannot get out quickly, work out where in their room is the safer place to ride the shaking out.

Pets deserve the same forethought: a carrier, a lead and some food in the same bag. A frightened animal bolts, and afterwards there is neither time nor anywhere to search.

Preparation decays on its own: water and food pass their dates, batteries leak, medicines run out, children outgrow the clothes, numbers change. Attach the check to something that already happens twice a year — the clocks changing, or the start of the school year.

Use the same occasion for a short conversation: where the meeting point is, who to call, who collects the children. It takes five minutes and is the difference between a plan and a plan everyone remembers.