No document replaces local knowledge. Practise under stress, reading is not the same as ability.
Local specificity: your flood map, your plants, your laws, your neighbours, your climate. Every module needs a "localise this" pass — that's a Phase-1 job for the app (a "my region" section).
Practice under stress: reading ≠ ability. The quarterly drills are where the plan becomes real.
Adaptability: every real crisis breaks some assumption. The families that do well aren't the ones with the perfect plan — they're the ones whose planning process taught them to improvise. The app's job is to make the knowledge available; yours is to make it embodied.
App note: add this as the fourth MDX section, and add "localise this" callout components + the two-person redundancy audit as an interactive checklist.
Going deeper
Everything above is from the household playbook. What follows expands on it.
The parent page closes the playbook by saying that every module needs a localise-this pass, and that the app's job is to make knowledge available while yours is to make it embodied. That is exactly right, and it stops short of saying what the pass contains. This is the list.
The fifteen local facts
Every one of these is specific to your postcode, none of them can be written into an app, and most of them take one evening to find and then never change.
Put the whole lot on one sheet, in the document pouch, and a copy on the fridge. It is the single most valuable page in your household's plan, and no publisher can supply it.
The three numbers to write down tonight
Of that list, three are worth doing before you close the app, because they are the ones people reach for and cannot find.
105. The free national number that connects you to your local electricity network operator, from anywhere in England, Scotland or Wales. This is not your energy supplier. The company you pay for electricity does not fix the wires; a separate regional network operator does, and 105 is how you reach them, report a cut and find out what is happening. Almost nobody knows this number and it is the one that matters in a power failure.
Your water company's emergency line, which is on the bill and is not the same as the customer services number.
Your BBC local radio frequency, which is the channel that will still work when nothing else does, and which nobody can recall under pressure.
Write all three on the family card, in pen, tonight. It takes two minutes and it is the highest-value thing on this page.
Walking your own ground
Some of the list cannot be looked up, only walked. Give it one Saturday.
Pace out 60 metres from your back door. That is the distance the sanitation chapter keeps insisting on, and almost everybody underestimates it. Find out whether a latrine could go anywhere on your plot at all, because on many British gardens the honest answer is no, and that changes what you stockpile.
Find where water pools after heavy rain, which the flood map will not show you and which decides where things get stored.
Look at your roof and your downpipes, and work out where a water butt could actually go.
Find the stopcock, the external stopcock, the gas control and the consumer unit, and label them.
Look at your own house from the pavement at night, which tells you what a stranger sees.
Walk to the nearest surface water, and time it. Then walk to your nearest neighbour who lives alone, and knock.
That afternoon converts more of this app into something usable than any amount of reading.
What the app genuinely cannot do
Worth being honest about, because it defines what is left for you.
It cannot know your risk. A household on a floodplain, a household on a hill and a household in a fifth-floor flat need three different plans, and only the third one has no garden and no stopcock of its own.
It cannot know your people. Who is old, who is ill, who cannot walk far, who depends on power, who would panic, who would be brilliant.
It cannot know your law in detail or in time. Snaring law has changed in two nations in two years. Landline networks are being switched off. This app tells you where to look and cannot be the source.
It cannot know your soil, your wind, your plants or your neighbours.
And it cannot make you practise. The parent page's middle bullet is the one that decides everything: reading is not ability. A page read is a page read.
Adaptability is a practice, not a trait
The parent page's last claim is the most important one in the whole playbook, and it deserves restating because it is easy to read as encouragement.
The families who do well are not the ones with the best plan. They are the ones whose planning taught them to improvise, and improvisation is a skill built by doing things imperfectly, in advance, and noticing what broke.
Which means the value was never in the document. It is in the household that filled the bath once to see how long it took, cooked a meal on the camping stove, spent a night without power, discovered they had no tin opener, and fixed it.
So end here, and go and do one thing. Fill a container. Find the stopcock. Write the card. Knock on a door. Any one of those, tonight, is worth more than finishing the reading, and the reading will still be here tomorrow.
What this is based on
Flood risk in the United Kingdom is assessed and published at postcode level, and surface water flood risk affects properties well away from watercourses
Electricity distribution is operated regionally by distribution network operators, which are separate companies from energy suppliers and are the correct contact during a power cut
105 is the free national telephone number connecting callers in England, Scotland and Wales to their local electricity network operator
Local authorities hold emergency plans and open rest centres, and publish local emergency information through their own channels
BBC local radio carries the designated emergency broadcasting role, and frequencies vary by county
Soil type, aspect and local climate determine which crops succeed, and vary substantially over short distances within Britain
Rehearsal under realistic conditions surfaces dependencies that are not visible when a plan is read