Read this first
This is an awareness game and an informal advice guide. It is not official guidance, and it is not medical, legal or emergency advice. If something is happening right now, call 999 and follow what the call handler tells you — not what this site says.
Last updated: 6 August 2026. Content review status: early draft — not yet checked line by line against official sources.
Purpose & Scope
"Not a Disaster" exists because official UK emergency advice is good and hardly anyone reads it. It is scattered across gov.uk, the NHS, the Met Office, the Environment Agency, individual fire and rescue services and individual water companies, it is written for people who already know the vocabulary, and it often arrives as a PDF.
This site restates a small part of that advice in plain English, wrapped in short fictional stories, so that members of the public encounter it at all. It is a starting point and a prompt to go and read the real thing. It is not a substitute for the real thing, and it is not comprehensive — whole categories of emergency are not covered here.
Not official, not affiliated
This site is produced independently. It is not produced by, endorsed by, approved by, or affiliated with the UK government, the NHS, UKHSA, the Met Office, the Environment Agency, SEPA, Natural Resources Wales, any fire and rescue service, any police force, any ambulance service, any local authority, any Local Resilience Forum or any water company.
Where this site links to those organisations, it is linking to their public guidance as a source. That does not imply any relationship with them, and they have no involvement in or responsibility for this site's content.
Fictional Scenarios
Every story on this site is invented. The characters, the places, the news headlines, the group chats and the social media posts are all fictional. Any resemblance to real people, real accounts, real publications or real incidents is coincidental and unintended.
Deliberately wrong content
Some of the fictional social media posts in the stories contain false or dangerous claims on purpose, because learning to spot them is the point of the exercise. Every false claim is corrected within the same screen, and the corrections are drawn from the official sources listed in the Guide.
Do not screenshot, quote or share those posts on their own. Out of context they are simply misinformation.
Accuracy & Currency
Advice is summarised in good faith from publicly available official guidance, but:
- it is a summary, and summarising loses detail that may matter in your situation;
- guidance changes, and this site may not have caught up;
- advice, phone numbers and legal rules differ between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and this site does not always distinguish between them;
- water company rules, hosepipe ban terms and local arrangements vary by area and by supplier;
- at the time of writing, this content has not completed its line-by-line verification against the linked sources.
Always check the official source linked on each Guide card, and check it for your own nation and your own supplier. If the official source and this site disagree, the official source is correct.
Not medical advice
Nothing here is medical advice and none of it is personalised to you. Heat, cold, medication and existing health conditions interact in ways this site cannot account for. Speak to a pharmacist, your GP, NHS 111, or in an emergency 999. Never change how you take prescribed medication on the basis of anything you read here.
No Liability
This site is provided as-is, without warranty of any kind — including as to completeness, accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, or freedom from error.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the creator accepts no liability for any loss, harm, injury or consequence arising from use of this site, from reliance on its content, or from decisions taken in real incidents by people who have used it. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud, where that limitation would be unlawful.
The meters, results and endings exist to prompt reflection and conversation. They are not an assessment of anybody's competence, preparedness or judgement, and must not be used as one — not for employment decisions, not for training records, not for anything formal.
Data & Privacy
Short version: nothing leaves your device
No accounts. No sign-up. No analytics. No advertising. No cookies. No tracking pixels. Your answers, your results and your progress are never sent anywhere.
The only thing stored is your light/dark theme preference, kept in your browser's local storage on your own device. Clearing your browser data removes it.
The site loads one font file from Google Fonts, which means Google receives the request for that file, including your IP address, in the same way as any other website using a hosted font. Everything else — all logic, all content — is contained in the page itself and works without a network connection once loaded.
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which keeps standard server request logs. If you email the address below, that email is held in an ordinary mailbox and is not added to any list.
Intellectual Property & Licensing
© 2026 Ben Phipps. All rights reserved.
The story structure, scenario content, decision options, consequence models, feedback text, advice summaries, design system and source code are the intellectual property of the creator.
The site is made freely available for personal, educational and non-commercial awareness use. You are welcome to link to it, share it, and use it with a community group, school, or as part of non-commercial public awareness activity.
What needs permission
- Reproducing, adapting or redistributing the content or code for commercial purposes
- Rebranding, white-labelling, or presenting it as the work of another organisation
- Including it in a paid product, paid training programme or accredited course
- Commissioning a version tailored to a specific area, hazard, organisation or audience
- Using the content to train or fine-tune machine learning models
All of these are available — they just need a conversation first. Commercial licensing, white-label versions and outright purchase of the project are all things the creator is open to discussing.
Advice content is summarised from UK public sector sources, much of which is published under the Open Government Licence. Those underlying sources remain the property of, and are credited to, the organisations that produced them. Their inclusion here does not imply endorsement.
Get In Touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome, particularly on accuracy. If something here is wrong, out of date, or differs where you live, please say so — that is the most useful thing anyone can send.
Good reasons to get in touch
- Content corrections — anything factually wrong, out of date, or that contradicts current official guidance
- Nation-specific differences — where advice, numbers or rules differ in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland
- Broken or moved source links
- Story suggestions — an emergency type that would be worth covering
- Accessibility problems — anything that made the site hard to read or use
- Licensing, commissioning or purchase enquiries
Please note
The creator is not able to give emergency planning advice, answer operational questions, respond to anything time-critical, or provide formal training guidance. For those, contact your Local Resilience Forum or the relevant official body. This inbox is not monitored and must never be used to report an emergency — call 999.
Opens your email client. Replies typically take a few days.