Earthquake

This is the least likely card in the set for a household in Britain, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than implying otherwise.

The honest British picture

Britain has earthquakes, several hundred detected a year, and almost all of them are too small to feel. The largest known onshore events are around magnitude 5, which rattles crockery, cracks plaster and occasionally dislodges chimney pots. Damaging earthquakes of the kind this card's actions are designed for do not happen here.

So a British household should not spend money or worry on this, and the card is correctly one of the shortest in the set.

It earns its place for three reasons:

1. Travel. Plenty of British families visit places where this genuinely applies, and the actions are the same everywhere.
2. The actions transfer. Drop, cover and hold on is also correct for an explosion, a building collapse or anything that makes a structure shake, and those are not vanishingly rare.
3. The gas rule afterwards is the same rule for any incident that may have disturbed pipework, including subsidence, a vehicle striking the building, or a landslip.

Drop, cover, hold on, and what is wrong

The card's first instruction is the internationally recommended one and it is worth understanding, because plausible alternatives circulate widely.

Drop to hands and knees before the shaking drops you. Cover your head and neck, and get under a sturdy table if one is within a step or two. Hold on to it, because furniture moves during shaking and you want to move with it.

The card's second instruction, shoes on once the shaking stops, is the underrated one. Broken glass on the floor is the single commonest injury in any shaken building, and it takes people out of action at exactly the moment they need to move. This is also why the everyday threats companion says keep shoes by the bed for fire and flood, and it is the same shoes.

The gas rule cuts both ways

The card sends you to check the gas valve, with the wrench zip-tied at the meter, which is a good piece of preparation.

The refinement is that turning gas off is not free.

Turn it off if: you can smell gas, you can hear it, the meter or pipework is visibly damaged, or the building has moved.

Leave it on if: none of that is true. Turning it off means it stays off until a registered engineer restores it and relights every appliance, which in a widespread incident could be a long wait, and it takes away your cooking and heating for the duration.

Electricity is the same judgement. Off at the consumer unit if there is visible damage, water, or a burning smell. Otherwise leave it.

What this card is really for

Everything after the shaking applies to a much wider set of events, which is the real reason to read it.

• Get out of a damaged building and stay out. The card's Never is the one that matters, and it applies to fire damage, subsidence, a vehicle impact and a partial collapse just as much. Aftershocks are the earthquake version; a weakened structure is the general version.
• Expect aftershocks, and expect them to be worse for anything already cracked.
• Check on neighbours, particularly anyone who cannot get themselves out.
• Do not ring 999 for information, only for an emergency. Lines are the scarce resource in a wide-area incident.
• Take photographs before clearing, for the insurance, as in every other card here.
• Have the building looked at before assuming a crack is cosmetic.

And if you travel to a country where this card is real, spend ten minutes on it in advance: where you would drop and cover in the accommodation, where the exits are, what the local emergency number is, and where the meeting point is. That is the same ten minutes the mindset companion recommends on arriving anywhere unfamiliar, and it is the whole of the preparation.