Ask a crew what the emergency action plan is for today's job. Most of the time you get one of two answers. Somebody points at a binder in the truck, or somebody says "call 911."

911 is not a plan. It's a phone call.

The plan is everything that has to be true after they answer. Who's coming. What they're bringing. Where they can put it down. How they reach the injured person. And the one nobody thinks about until it's too late, how that person gets out.

ESCAPE is emergency action planning that fits on a tailboard instead of in a binder. Six letters. Six questions. About four minutes before the first boot leaves the truck.

This is the card.

WHAT'S ON IT

The front is the six questions you ask your crew out loud, each one with the exact words to say.

E — Exercise. Have we practiced this, or only written it?

S — Site Conditions. What can hinder our rescue or evacuation?

C — Communication. How will we communicate our emergency?

A — Access. How did we get to the job site?

P — Position. Where are we?

E — Egress. How are we getting out of the job site?

The back is what you hand to dispatch when it goes bad, grouped by the letter it comes from.

Position: street address or nearest cross street, GPS coordinates, and your position on the electrical system.

Access: your route from the main road, and whether the turn points are coned or flagged.

Site conditions: whether it's safe for EMS to enter, and what's still live if it isn't.

Communication: cell service here, your backup device, and the nearest location with confirmed coverage.

Egress: whether a vehicle can reach the patient, the helicopter LZ, whether weather lets a ship fly today, and time to definitive care by air and by road.

Fill it in at the tailboard, in pen, every job. Not because the paperwork matters. Because a man reading that card out loud on the worst day of his life shouldn't have to remember anything.

HOW TO USE IT

Print it. Cut it. Glue or laminate the two halves back to back. Fill in the back in pen at the tailboard, every job.

Then read the six questions out loud, the same way you'd read a switching order. If any answer is a shrug, you don't have an emergency action plan yet. You have a way to work.

Four minutes. It fits a shirt pocket and it's made to get dirty.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

THE FULL-PAGE VERSION. Two sides, 8.5 by 11. Print two-sided, flip on the long edge, and laminate it. Fill it in with an ultra fine tip dry erase marker so it resets for every site and you can change it the moment conditions change. Keep it with the first aid kit and the AED, so it travels with the thing you'll reach for first.

THE POCKET VERSION. The same six questions and the same dispatch information on a card that fits in a shirt pocket. Print, cut on the line, and laminate the two halves back to back.

Take the full page for the truck and the kit. Take the pocket card for the man who's climbing.

WHY IT EXISTS

I built ESCAPE out of two incidents.

One of them was a crew in the mountains of northern California who did everything right. They walked the ground. They rigged good access. They briefed the work. When a platform failed and two men fell sixty feet, they called for help in the first seconds. And then paramedics stood at the bottom of a forty-degree slope and looked up at a jobsite they had no way to reach. A man died fifty yards from a road.

That crew named every step of how they'd get up that hill. Nobody named how he'd come down.

The other incident was mine.

This card is free because the people who need it most are standing at a tailboard right now, and four minutes is the only thing standing between their plan and their place.

Lito Wilkins

Wired For Safety