By Austin Senior Advisor Care Team · August 11, 2026
Texas requires every licensed assisted living community to hand residents and their representatives a written emergency plan or evacuation summary. Most Austin families have never seen theirs. Here is what is in it and how to ask.
The document you were supposed to receive at move-in
Somewhere in the folder your parent got on move-in day there was supposed to be an emergency preparedness and response plan, or a condensed version of it called an evacuation summary. If you cannot find it, that is not unusual. Most families cannot.
The obligation is not a suggestion. Under the Texas assisted living licensing rules at 26 TAC §553.275, a facility must give residents and their legally authorized representatives a written copy of the plan or the evacuation summary at three moments: upon admission, on request, and whenever the facility makes a significant change to a copy it has already given you.
That middle phrase is the one to use. On request. You do not need a reason, a lawyer, or a care conference on the calendar. You can walk into the front office in August and ask for the current evacuation summary, and the community is required to produce it.
The same rule says a current printed copy of the full plan has to sit in a central location accessible to all staff, residents, and legally authorized representatives at all times. If nobody can tell you where that copy lives, you have learned something before you have read a word of it.
What the summary is actually required to contain
An evacuation summary is not a one-page reassurance sheet. The rule defines its contents, and knowing the list lets you tell a real one from a marketing document.
It must name the receiving facility or pre-arranged evacuation destination, with address and contact information. It must describe how residents will be safely transported. It must give the name or title and contact information of the staff member you call for evacuation information. It must state the facility's primary mode of communication during an emergency and its backup mode. It must describe how the facility notifies families about actions affecting residents, including an impending or actual evacuation, and how it keeps communicating for the duration.
It must also state what training is available to you, and it must describe what happens if a resident evacuates with someone who is not a staff member — the scenario where you show up at the door and drive your mother to your house yourself.
Read the transportation line closely. The plan is required to identify current arrangements for access to enough vehicles to safely evacuate every resident, and to name the staff designated to drive them. A community that intends to rely on 911 and improvisation has not met that standard, and the gap is visible in the document.
Sixty-eight to eighty-two degrees
The single most concrete number in the whole rule is a temperature band. If the community decides to shelter in place rather than evacuate, it must provide power and ambient temperatures in the areas residents are using that are safe under the circumstances, and specifically not less than 68 degrees Fahrenheit and not more than 82 degrees.
In Austin that number has been tested from both directions. February 2021 and the February 2023 ice storm produced multi-day, metro-wide outages here. Summer heat is the other half of it, and we wrote about what actually helps older adults in Central Texas heat separately.
So the question to ask is not "do you have a generator." The question is: how do you hold 68 to 82 degrees for 72 hours with no grid power, and what have you tested? Then listen for whether the answer covers the whole building or one common room, whether it covers refrigerated medications, and how long the fuel lasts.
Be careful about assumptions here. Texas does not impose a single blanket backup-power requirement on every licensed assisted living community regardless of size or age; the generator provisions in the licensing standards attach to particular categories of facility. Rather than guess which category a given Austin community falls into, ask the community directly and ask to see it. The temperature obligation applies either way, and it is the obligation that protects your parent.
The rule also requires the plan to spell out arrangements for accessing medication, records, equipment, supplies, water and food during a shelter-in-place, including food for residents on a medically necessary special diet. If your father is on a renal or diabetic diet, that sentence is about him.
Where everybody goes, and whether that place agreed to it
The evacuation section is where thin plans get exposed. A facility must identify evacuation destinations and routes and include a map. More importantly, it must hold a documented acknowledgment from an authorized representative of at least one receiving facility or pre-arranged destination — and at least one alternate.
Acknowledgment means the other place agreed in writing, in advance, to take these residents and understands the process for being notified and for confirming at the time that it is actually able to receive them. A name written on a plan without that acknowledgment is a hope, not an arrangement.
Ask where the alternate is. In a regional event — a grid failure, an ice storm that closes I-35 and the 620 corridor, a wildfire moving through western Travis County — the primary destination is likely absorbing the same conditions your parent's building is. Distance and direction matter, and a family that knows both destinations in advance can meet the bus instead of calling around for six hours.
One more provision worth knowing, because it explains how the receiving end works. A community acting as a receiving facility may not exceed its licensed capacity unless HHSC pre-approves it in writing, and even then by no more than 10 percent. Capacity in this market is finite during a regional emergency, which is exactly why the pre-arrangement exists.
A facility gets to use its own judgment about when to evacuate, with one hard exception: it must evacuate if the county judge or the mayor orders it. In practice that means a Travis County or City of Austin order overrides whatever the administrator would have preferred.
Get your name on the notification list, in writing
The rule builds a notification chain, and it is worth checking which link you are. It requires the facility's plan to describe how it notifies, as soon as practicable, all staff including off-duty staff, each resident, any legally authorized representative, each resident's designated emergency contacts, every home health agency or independent clinician serving a resident in the building, the receiving destination, the drivers, and the emergency management coordinator.
A "designated emergency contact" has a specific definition: a person that the resident, or the resident's legally authorized representative, identifies in writing for the facility to contact in a disaster or emergency. Being the daughter who visits every Sunday does not put you on that list. A form does.
If you have siblings out of state, add them too. The list is not limited to one person, and the sibling in Denver who is awake at 4 a.m. Central is an asset during an overnight event. If you are managing an Austin parent from elsewhere, the rest of that problem is laid out in our long-distance caregiving walkthrough.
While you are at it, confirm the facility's resident list identifies your parent correctly. The plan is required to flag residents with Alzheimer's disease or related disorders, residents with an approved evacuation waiver, and residents with mobility limitations or other special needs who may need specialized assistance. A parent whose mobility has declined since move-in may be recorded as she was two years ago. Care plan reviews are the natural place to fix that, and we cover what else to raise there in the care plan review guide.
The drill happened. Did anyone tell you?
Every licensed community must conduct at least one unannounced annual drill with staff, for severe weather or another emergency the facility's own risk assessment identifies as likely. That risk assessment is itself required to consider fire, power and water outages, wildfire, flooding, hurricanes and severe weather, hazardous materials, epidemics and more, weighed against the building's actual geography and construction and the needs of the people inside it.
You can ask when the last drill was, what it simulated, and what the facility changed afterward. That last part is the useful one, because the rule requires the plan to be updated within 30 days if a drill reveals a shortcoming. A community that ran a drill and changed nothing either has an unusually good plan or was not looking very hard.
There is also a training obligation pointed directly at families. The facility must offer training to each resident, each legally authorized representative, and each designated emergency contact on the parts of the plan that involve them — and must document, for each person, whether the training was provided or refused. If you have never been offered it, that documentation says something.
None of this is adversarial. Asking about drills lands very differently from asking about staffing ratios, and administrators who take preparedness seriously generally enjoy the conversation. If the reaction is defensive, that is information too — the same kind you gather on a tour, which we cover in how to tour without getting sold.
What Austin gives you that the facility does not
Two local systems sit outside the facility's plan and are worth setting up yourself.
Warn Central Texas is the regional notification system run through the Capital Area Council of Governments, covering Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, Caldwell, Burnet, Blanco, Fayette, Lee and Llano counties. Registration at warncentraltexas.org is free, and the part families miss is that you can register more than one address. Put your parent's building in alongside your own house. You will then hear about the boil-water notice or the evacuation zone at the same time the facility does, rather than after.
Austin Energy's Medically Vulnerable Registry applies to a parent still living at home, not in a facility, because eligibility runs through the utility account holder. It offers bill support and a personalized emergency backup plan for residents sustained by life support equipment or being treated for a critical or serious illness affected by temperature. Apply online or call Customer Care at 512-494-9400, with the medical provider's name and number ready. Austin Energy is explicit about the limits, and so are we: enrollment does not guarantee uninterrupted power or priority restoration. It is a case-management program, not a promise about the grid.
Finally, 2-1-1 Texas maintains the state's evacuation assistance registry. The licensing rule requires the facility to notify each resident, next of kin or legally authorized representative in writing how to register with it, and requires the facility itself to register as a provider. If your parent lives at home, registering is a ten-minute call and the right thing to do before hurricane remnants or an ice event, not during one.
If the plan is not there
Suppose you ask, and you get a shrug, or a laminated fire-exit diagram, or a promise to email something that never arrives.
Start by asking once more in writing, by email, addressed to the administrator, naming the evacuation summary and citing 26 TAC §553.275. Most of the time the document exists and the front desk simply did not know where it was. A written request also creates a record with a date on it.
If it still does not come, call the long-term care ombudsman. For the Austin area that is the Capital Area Area Agency on Aging, at 512-916-6054. The office is free, confidential, and independent of the facility, and access to required documents is squarely within what it handles. Our ombudsman page explains how the office works and what it can and cannot do.
For a regulatory complaint about a licensed Texas facility, the number is HHSC Complaint and Incident Intake, 1-800-458-9858. That is the same line the rule requires facilities to call to report a fire, or a resident death or serious injury arising from a disaster. Keep it distinct from Adult Protective Services at 1-800-252-5400, which handles abuse and neglect in community settings rather than in licensed facilities.
Before any of that, it is worth looking at what the state has already documented about the building. Inspection history is public, and we walk through how to read one without panicking in this guide, with the verification steps on our license lookup page.
What to do this month
Request the evacuation summary in writing and read the destination, the transportation arrangement and the communication method.
Confirm in writing that you — and any sibling who could act — are listed as designated emergency contacts, and that the phone numbers on file are current.
Ask two questions out loud: how the building holds 68 to 82 degrees without grid power, and where the alternate evacuation destination is.
Register your parent's address at warncentraltexas.org in addition to your own.
Write down 512-916-6054 for the ombudsman and 1-800-458-9858 for HHSC intake, and put them somewhere other than the drawer the move-in folder went into.
If your parent is still at home rather than in a community, the same preparation applies with different tools, and the earlier decisions are covered in what to do when living alone stops working.
