How to Make a Home Fire Escape Plan

By Fire Safety BD · Last updated 2026-10-05

Two ways out, a meeting point and a practice run: a plan a family can agree in one evening, including flats with window grilles.

In a fire, smoke can fill a flat within minutes and there is no time to work out what to do. A plan agreed beforehand turns those minutes into movement.

Make the plan

1. Walk through your home and find two ways out of each room where possible — usually the door and a second route such as a balcony or another room.
2. Know your building's stairs. If there is more than one staircase, know where each comes out.
3. Choose a meeting point outside — a gate, a shop or a tree everyone knows — so you can count heads quickly.
4. Decide who helps whom: young children, elderly relatives and anyone who cannot move quickly.
5. Save 999 in every phone and teach children to say the address.

Window grilles and locked gates

Many flats have fixed grilles on windows and balconies, and a collapsible gate that is locked at night.

• Have at least one grille that opens from the inside, on the side away from the main door if possible.
• Keep its key in a fixed place close by that everyone knows, not on a bunch somewhere else.
• Keep the main door and gate keys in the same place every night.
• Do not store boxes, shoe racks or gas cylinders in the stair landing — the stairs are everyone's way out.

When the alarm sounds or you see fire

• Shout to wake everyone and leave straight away.
• Stay low under smoke, where the air is clearer.
• Touch a closed door with the back of your hand. If it is hot, use the other way out.
• Close doors behind you to slow the fire.
• Use the stairs, never the lift.
• Once out, stay out. Call 999 from outside.

Practise

Walk the plan with the whole household twice a year, once in the dark with a torch. Check at the same time that the smoke detectors work and that the grille key is where it should be.