Check your inbox. If it isn't there in a couple of minutes, look in promotions or spam and drag it to your primary folder, because everything I send after this will land in the same place.
1.
Print it two-sided. Flip on the long edge so side 2 lands on the back of side 1.
2.
Laminate it. A pouch laminator or a self-seal pouch from any office store will do it.
3.
Get a fine tip dry erase marker. Not a regular one. Fine tip is the difference between a card you can actually fill out and a card with four words on it.
4.
Put it with the first aid kit and the AED. Not in a binder. Not in the door pocket. With the gear you'd reach for on the worst day, so it travels with the thing you'll grab first.
The pocket version is on page 3 of the same file. Print it, cut on the line, laminate the two halves back-to-back. That one goes in a shirt pocket for whoever is climbing.
At the brief, pull it out and read the six questions out loud. Not silently. Out loud, the same way you'd read a switching order, and let the crew answer them.
Then fill in side 2 in pen or marker. Address or cross street. Coordinates. Circuit, structure, nearest source side device. How you got in, spelled out the way you'd read it back to a dispatcher.
Then do the one thing that takes longer than four minutes and matters more than all of it. Walk the rescue. Once. Before you start.
If any answer is a shrug, you found your gap before it found you.
I walk crews and leadership teams through this on their own jobsites, with their own terrain and their own worst day on the table. Half a day, a full day, or a keynote at your safety stand-down.
Reply to the email that just landed with your next stand-down or safety meeting date, and I'll tell you straight whether I'm the right fit for it.
I built ESCAPE out of two incidents.
One of them was a crew in northern California who did everything right, and a man who died fifty yards from a road because nobody named how he'd come down.
The other one was mine. October 19, 2015. The plan that morning said a helicopter. Sixteen minutes. What happened was a supervisor's truck for fifty-eight.
You can't solve what you won't say out loud.