Everyday threats

This is the most useful page in the protection module, because everything on it is likely. These are the five entries where the common mental picture is wrong, and the correction matters.

Drowning does not look like drowning

The parent page says every child swims, and it is right. This is the part that saves the child of somebody who can swim.

Drowning is almost silent. It looks nothing like the splashing, shouting, arm-waving version everyone has seen on television, and adults regularly watch a child drown a few metres away without recognising it.

So the things to actually watch for: head low with mouth at water level, head tilted back, eyes glassy or closed, hair over the face, vertical body going nowhere, trying to swim in a direction and not moving, or a child who was making noise and has gone quiet.

Quiet children in water are the signal. Noisy is fine. Silence is the thing to check.

Ask, out loud: "are you all right?" Somebody who can answer is probably fine. Somebody who looks at you and cannot answer has seconds.

Fire is an evacuation, not a fight

The parent page's kit list is right and the framing needs one addition, because the extinguisher on the wall changes how people behave.

Two things the parent page gets right that deserve emphasis.

Close bedroom doors at night. It is free, it is done every night with no equipment, and it substantially changes conditions inside the room. It is probably the highest-value habit in this whole module.

Drill it at night, with the children. A route walked in daylight is not the route you will use. Do it once with the lights off, low to the floor, feeling for the door handle, and check the handle-is-hot rule is understood.

And replace the alarms on schedule. Smoke alarms are replaced roughly every ten years, whether or not they still beep when tested. The test button confirms the sounder works, not the sensor. Write the replacement date on the unit in marker.

The floodwater numbers

The parent page says 30 cm of moving water floats a car. The useful set of figures is a little different, and lower than most people assume.

The depth is not the main danger anyway. What is under the water is: a lifted manhole cover, a washed-out road surface, a ditch you cannot see, debris, and sewage. Floodwater on a road is opaque, and the road you drove yesterday is not necessarily still there.

So the rule is simply: do not enter it, on foot or in a vehicle. Turn around. This is the leading cause of flood deaths and it is entirely a decision, every time.

Sign up for flood warnings now if you are anywhere near a watercourse, and know the three levels: flood alert means be prepared, flood warning means act now, severe flood warning means danger to life. Knowing which one has been issued is the difference between moving the car and moving upstairs.

Ladders, and the height that hurts people

The parent page is right that ladders and chainsaws injure more people than anything apocalyptic. Two specifics.

Most ladder falls are from low heights. People take care at the top of a long ladder and step off a stool. The injuries come from short falls onto hard surfaces, usually because the ladder moved.

• Secure it, or have somebody foot it. The single change that prevents most incidents.
• Three points of contact, and do not reach sideways. Move the ladder instead. Reaching is what tips it.
• Not in wind, not on soft or uneven ground, not in the wet.
• Never alone on anything high in a crisis, when there is no ambulance and nobody knows where you are.

Chainsaws: the honest position is do not, unless you are trained and wearing the proper protective trousers, boots, gloves and visor. A chainsaw injury is a major bleeding event, it happens in seconds, and it happens at exactly the moment a household has no route to a hospital. A bow saw takes longer and does not do that.

The boring health items that outrank all of it

The parent page's last line is the one to act on this month, and it is worth expanding because every item is cheap and none of it is interesting.

• Spare glasses in every kit. The parent page puts an exclamation mark on this and it earns it. Somebody who cannot read cannot use any page in this app.
• Tetanus up to date. You will cut yourself on something dirty. Check it now, while it is a phone call.
• Teeth fixed while dentists exist. There is no dentist in a blackout, and toothache stops a person sleeping, eating and thinking.
• Blood pressure known, and any nagging condition dealt with rather than deferred. The chapter on what actually kills people in British emergencies is mostly about existing conditions getting worse.
• Everybody swims. A skill, not a hobby, exactly as the parent says.
• Prescriptions ordered the day they are due, which builds a fortnight of buffer permanently and for free.

None of that feels like preparedness, which is precisely why it gets skipped in favour of equipment. It is also where almost all of the real risk in an ordinary British year actually sits.