Emergency Preparedness: The Numbers, the Order, and the Drills

What Emergency Preparedness Actually Covers

Preparedness is the work you do in advance so that a disruption stays an inconvenience. It breaks into five problems, and almost everything you will read on this site sits in one of them.

• Water. Enough stored, plus a way to make doubtful water safe. This is the shortest clock you face, so it comes first.
• Power and heat. Keeping food cold, medical equipment running and the house habitable, without poisoning anyone in the process.
• Food. Food that needs no refrigeration and little or no cooking, and a plan for the refrigerator contents when the power goes.
• Information and communication. Knowing what is happening and being able to tell your household where you are when the phones are unreliable.
• Medical. Treating what you can treat, recognising what you cannot, and keeping prescriptions and devices running.

Two things sit outside this category. Long-horizon food storage and water systems live in Water & Food Storage, and field skills — fire, shelter, navigation — live in Bushcraft and First Aid. Preparedness here means the household, the vehicle and the first few days.

The official baselines we work from are Ready.gov, FEMA, CDC Emergency Preparedness and the American Red Cross. Read them directly. They are free, unsensational, and better than most of what is written about them.

The Numbers That Do Most of the Work

You can carry the whole field in your head with about eight figures. Memorise these and most gear arguments settle themselves.

• One gallon (3.8 L) per person per day. The standard planning figure for drinking and basic sanitation. It is a floor, not an answer — heat, exertion, pregnancy, illness and pets push it up. See how much water to store per person.
• 3 days to evacuate, 2 weeks at home. Ready.gov's split. A grab-and-go kit covers 72 hours; the house should aim higher, because sheltering in place is the far more likely outcome.
• 1 minute at a rolling boil, and 3 minutes above 6,500 ft (2,000 m). The EPA's emergency disinfection guidance for microbiologically unsafe water. Boiling is the first choice whenever you have fuel.
• 4 hours / 48 hours / 24 hours. An unopened refrigerator holds safe temperature about 4 hours; a full freezer about 48; a half-full freezer about 24. FoodSafety.gov has the detail.
• 40°F (4°C) and 2 hours. Perishable food held above that temperature for more than two hours goes in the bin. Do not taste it to decide.
• 20 ft (6 m). The minimum distance to run a generator from the house, with the exhaust pointed away from doors, windows and vents. Never in a garage, porch or crawlspace, even with the door open.
• 100–120 compressions per minute, at least 2 in (5 cm) deep for adult CPR. A number worth knowing, and no substitute for a hands-on class.
• 10 years. The replacement interval for smoke alarms, and roughly what a carbon monoxide alarm gets before its sensor is past trusting. Check the date printed on the back of yours.

If you only ever act on one line here, make it the generator distance. Carbon monoxide kills quietly during exactly the outages people prepare for.

The Emergency Preparedness Checklist, in Working Order

Sequence matters more than completeness. The list below is ordered by how quickly each item fails you, not by how interesting it is to buy. Work down it. Stop when you run out of weekend and pick it up next time.

• 1. Water for three days. One gallon (3.8 L) per person per day, stored where you can lift it. Commercially bottled water, rotated on the printed date, is the least trouble.
• 2. Light that is not your phone. One headlamp per person, plus spare batteries stored outside the device. Candles are a fire you have to supervise.
• 3. A way to hear official information. A battery or hand-crank radio that receives NOAA Weather Radio, and alerts enabled on your phone. Sources: the National Weather Service and your local emergency management office.
• 4. Three days of food that needs no cooking. Things your household already eats. Novelty rations get thrown away uneaten.
• 5. Medications and medical devices. A written list of every prescription with dose and pharmacy, plus whatever your insurer will let you keep ahead. Anything refrigerated or powered needs its own plan, written down.
• 6. A first aid kit you have opened. Start with the wilderness first aid kit build and trim it to your training.
• 7. Copies of documents. Insurance, identification, deeds, prescriptions, a photo of each room for claims. Encrypted on a drive and on paper.
• 8. Cash in small bills. Card terminals depend on the same grid and network you have just lost.
• 9. A household communication plan. One out-of-area contact everyone can reach, and a meeting point. Written on paper in each wallet, not only in a phone.
• 10. A go-bag. Once the house is sorted, build the 72-hour emergency kit — and weigh it.
• 11. Backup power, if you need it. Last, deliberately, because it is the most expensive and the most dangerous to get wrong. Start with backup power for a home outage.

The most common failure is starting at item 11.

Water, Food and the Refrigerator Clock

Water is the constraint that arrives first. A gallon (3.8 L) per person per day covers drinking and minimal hygiene, and a household of four planning for two weeks is looking at 56 gallons (212 L) — around 470 lb (213 kg) of water. That weight is why almost nobody stores two weeks in bottles, and why a treatment method matters as much as a stack of jugs.

Order of preference for making doubtful water safe:

• Boiling. A rolling boil for 1 minute, or 3 minutes above 6,500 ft (2,000 m). Kills pathogens; does nothing for chemical contamination or heavy metals, and in fact concentrates them.
• Unscented household bleach, following the EPA's ratios — roughly 1/8 teaspoon (8 drops) of 6% sodium hypochlorite per gallon (3.8 L) of clear water, stirred, then left to stand 30 minutes. Cloudy water gets double, filtered through cloth first. Check the concentration on your bottle against the EPA table rather than trusting a memorised figure, and do not use scented, colour-safe or additive bleaches.
• Filtration, which handles protozoa and bacteria depending on pore size, and viruses only if the product specifically claims and substantiates it.

Food is a slower problem with one sharp edge: the refrigerator. When the power goes, the door stays shut. Roughly 4 hours in the fridge, 48 in a full freezer, 24 in a half-full one. Anything perishable that sits above 40°F (4°C) for more than 2 hours is no longer food. An appliance thermometer left in the fridge turns that judgement call into a reading, which is worth the few dollars it costs. For the pantry side, see the 30-day pantry build; for the underlying rules, FoodSafety.gov and the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Power, Heat and Carbon Monoxide

This is the part of preparedness that hurts people. Outages are when households start burning things indoors, and the resulting carbon monoxide has no smell, no colour and no warning symptoms you can rely on.

The rules are not negotiable:

• Generators run outdoors, at least 20 ft (6 m) from the house, exhaust directed away from doors, windows and vents. Not in a garage with the door open. Not on a covered porch. Not in a basement or crawlspace.
• Charcoal and camp stoves are outdoor equipment. So are propane heaters not explicitly rated and vented for indoor use.
• A gas range is not a furnace. Using the oven for heat is a CO source and a fire risk.
• Battery-powered CO alarms on every level, tested when you test the smoke alarms. Check the manufacture date; sensors expire.

On the equipment itself, the practical question is what you are keeping alive. Lighting and phone charging is a power-bank problem measured in watt-hours. A CPAP, an oxygen concentrator, a well pump or a refrigerator is a different category entirely, and the honest answer is that a medically dependent household needs to speak to the utility about priority restoration and to the clinician about a plan — not to buy a bigger battery and hope. We work through the sizing arithmetic in backup power for a home outage.

Heat without power is mostly a clothing and containment problem: layers, sleeping bags, one room chosen and closed off, windows covered at night. It is unglamorous and it works.

Alerts, Communication and the Household Plan

Information failure is what turns a manageable event into a frightening one. Two things are worth setting up before you need them, and both are free.

Alerts. Enable Wireless Emergency Alerts on every phone in the house, and know your local emergency management channel — county or municipal, not a national aggregator. For weather, go to the National Weather Service directly. A battery or hand-crank NOAA radio covers you when the cell network is congested or down, which is common in the first hours of a widespread event.

A plan on paper. The single most useful item in most kits is an index card. It carries:

• One out-of-area contact everyone in the household calls or texts. Local circuits congest first; a distant number often gets through when a neighbour's does not.
• Two meeting points — one near the home, one outside the immediate neighbourhood.
• Each household member's key numbers, written out, because nobody memorises phone numbers any more.
• Medication names and doses, allergies, and the pharmacy.
• School and workplace release procedures, which usually will not let you simply turn up.

Text rather than call when networks are strained; short messages queue and retry where voice calls fail outright. Keep one phone off or in low-power mode as a reserve, and know that a car is a charging point.

For households with children, elderly relatives, a disability, or pets, the plan is the preparedness work — more than any purchase. Ready.gov's planning pages are the best free starting template we know of, and there is no reason to rewrite them badly here.

The Mistakes We See Most Often

Preparedness fails in predictable ways, and almost none of them are gear failures.

• Buying before planning. A pre-packed kit bought in an afternoon answers a question you have not asked yet. The contents are chosen for margin and shipping weight, not for your household's medications, climate or vehicle.
• Storing food nobody eats. Emergency food that is unfamiliar gets skipped by children and by adults under stress. Buy what is already in your rotation, then rotate it.
• Ignoring weight. A go-bag is only a go-bag if you can carry it. Our standard is simple: if you cannot walk 3 miles (5 km) with it at a normal pace, it is luggage. Most published kit lists fail this test badly.
• One point of failure for water. Bottles with no treatment method, or a filter with no stored water, are both half a plan.
• Batteries left in devices. They corrode and take the device with them. Store them separately, and standardise on one or two cell sizes across your lights and radio.
• Untested equipment. A stove still sealed in its packaging, a generator that has not run since purchase, a filter nobody has assembled. Equipment you have not operated is a hypothesis.
• Documents only in the cloud. The cloud requires power and a network, which is precisely what you have lost.
• Treating preparedness as an event. It is a maintenance habit measured in a couple of hours a year, not a weekend of shopping followed by five years of forgetting.

The pattern underneath all of these is the same. Stockpiles are static and reassuring; skills and rehearsals are the parts that hold up when conditions change.

Drills That Prove It Works

A checklist is a claim. A drill is a test. These are the checks we use to decide whether a household setup is real, each with a stated standard so you can pass or fail honestly.

• The blackout evening. Kill the main breaker at dusk. Cook a meal, light the house, keep phones alive and get everyone to bed using only what you have stored. Pass: nobody opens the refrigerator, nobody uses a flame indoors, and no one needs the breaker back on before morning.
• The 10-minute departure. From a standing start, load the household and go-bags into the vehicle. Pass: everyone and everything out the door in 10 minutes, with medications and documents accounted for.
• The carry test. Weigh the loaded go-bag, then walk 3 miles (5 km) with it. Pass: you finish at a normal pace without repacking. Fail means you cut ounces, not that you train harder.
• The water arithmetic. Count stored gallons, divide by household size. Pass: at least 3 days at one gallon (3.8 L) per person per day, with a treatment method on hand and previously used.
• The contact card. Ask each household member, unprompted, for the out-of-area contact and the meeting point. Pass: everyone answers from memory or from the card in their wallet — not from a phone.
• The alarm sweep. Test every smoke and CO alarm and read the manufacture date on each. Pass: all sound, none is past its stated service life.
• The cold-start check. Start the generator, light the stove, assemble the filter. Pass: each runs on the first attempt with the fuel and parts you actually store.

Run the short ones twice a year alongside the clock change; the blackout evening once a year is enough. Write down what failed. The failures are the useful output — that is the same discipline we apply to gear in how we test.

What We Will and Will Not Recommend

Everything in this category is written against a fixed standard, so you know what you are reading.

What we will do:

• Tie recommendations to a published agency figure with a link, or to a documented field test whose conditions, sample size and failures are written down.
• Publish the protocol before the verdict — what we measured, in what conditions, and what would have counted as a failure.
• State when the evidence is thin, when a sample size is one, and when the honest answer is that it depends on your climate, household or utility.
• Recommend the cheapest item that passes, including no item at all when a habit or a written plan does the same job.
• Correct figures in place and mark what changed. Our editorial policy and affiliate disclosure set out how that works.

What we will not do:

• Publish a shopping list as a substitute for a skill. If a drill in this category has no pass/fail standard attached, it is not finished.
• Use fear, countdowns or implied collapse to move gear. Preparedness sold on dread tends to be expensive and poorly matched to what actually happens.
• Recommend a product we have not used, or restate a manufacturer's claim as a finding.
• Guess at a safety-critical number. Boil times, bleach ratios, CO distances, CPR rates and food spoilage windows come from published guidance, and if we are unsure of an exact figure we describe it qualitatively and send you to the source.
• Pretend a website replaces training. Take a hands-on first aid class. Read Ready.gov and your local emergency management guidance directly.

If you are starting from nothing, work through Start Here and then the checklist above in order. If you have the basics covered, the build guides go deeper: the 72-hour emergency kit, water storage per person and backup power.