This is the lesson to remember under stress, so it is deliberately the simplest. When a fire starts, your goal is three words: get out, stay out, and call for help from outside. Everything else is subordinate to that, and it is worth saying explicitly what everything else includes, because in the moment these will not feel optional. Belongings. Documents. Photographs. A pet you cannot reach on your way out. The cause of the fire. Turning off the stove. Every one of those has killed somebody who went back for it. Firefighters arrive with breathing apparatus, protective gear, and training you do not have, and a pet is far more likely to survive a fire than a person who re-enters for one. The reason we rehearse a plan is precisely so that in the two minutes you have, you are executing rather than deciding what matters most.

Here is the whole response, in order, and the order matters. When the alarm sounds, go. Do not investigate. Stay low as you move, crawling if you have to, because the air near the floor is cooler and clearer while the ceiling layer may be hundreds of degrees and unbreathable. Before opening any door, feel it with the back of your hand, and check the handle and the gap at the top. If it is hot, there is fire on the other side and you use your second way out instead. Close every door behind you as you go. That single habit buys you time and can be the difference between a survivable room and a lethal one. Get to your meeting place. Then, from outside, call nine one one, and tell them the address and whether anyone is still inside. And stay out. The count at the meeting place is what tells the arriving crew who they are looking for and where.

Under stress people reach for a small number of predictable instincts, and each one is dangerous, so it is worth knowing them before you need to. Children hide, often under a bed or in a closet, which is why we practise going to the door rather than trusting instinct. Adults go back in, usually for a person they believe is still inside or for something irreplaceable, and re-entry is the single most common way a survivable fire becomes fatal. People take the lift, which can open onto the fire floor or lose power with them inside. And people gather things, which costs them the only two minutes they had. Notice that none of these are stupid. They are all normal human responses to fear, which is exactly why the countermeasure is not willpower but rehearsal. You do not out-argue panic in the moment. You practise until the right action is the automatic one.

Two reflexes are worth committing to memory, because both are cases where the instinctive response makes things worse. If your clothing catches fire, stop where you are, drop to the ground, cover your face with your hands, and roll until the flames are out. Running feeds the fire with air and turns a burn into a much worse one. Then cool the burn with cool running water for at least ten minutes, and get it looked at. The second reflex is the kitchen. If a pan of oil catches fire, turn off the heat and slide a lid or a baking tray over the pan to smother it, then leave it alone until it is completely cool. Do not move the pan, and never throw water on burning grease. Water hitting hot oil flashes instantly to steam and throws burning oil across the room, which turns a pan fire into a room fire and a burn across your face and arms. For an oven fire, keep the door shut and turn the oven off. Both of these are the fire triangle again: you are taking away the oxygen.

Sometimes the exits are gone, and you need a plan for that too, because the alternative is improvising in smoke. If you cannot get out, your goal changes from escaping to staying alive in place and being easy to find. Get behind a closed door, and put as many closed doors as you can between yourself and the fire. Testing shows a closed door can hold a room at survivable temperatures while the corridor outside is over a thousand degrees, and it cuts the carbon monoxide reaching you enormously. Seal the gaps with towels, bedding, or clothing, wet if water is to hand. Call nine one one and tell them exactly where you are, which room, which floor, which side of the building. That information gets to the crew outside. Then go to the window and make yourself visible: open it if you can, and signal with a torch, a phone screen, or a light-coloured cloth. Do not break the glass unless you have no other option, because an open window you can close again gives you control over the smoke.

Finally, build the plan around the people who will actually be in the building, not around a fit adult who wakes instantly. A plan that only works for that person is not a plan. Children need to be practised with, and need to know that a firefighter in breathing apparatus looks and sounds frightening and is still the person to go to. Older adults and anyone with limited mobility should sleep on the ground floor where that is possible, and their escape route needs to be walked rather than assumed. Someone who is deaf or hard of hearing needs alarms with a strobe or a bed shaker, because a standard horn does not wake them. Someone who uses a wheelchair, or oxygen, or who cannot manage stairs unaided, needs an assigned person and a route that works, and that assignment has to be agreed in advance and rehearsed. Pets should be part of the plan too, which in practice means knowing where they sleep and telling the fire crew, not searching the house.