// Food & Water

• Water: One gallon (3.8 liters) per person per day. That comes to 3 gallons, roughly 11.4 liters, across 72 hours. The allocation covers drinking and basic sanitation together. Increase it for hot climates, illness, pregnancy, or formula preparation. FEMA standard →

• Storage: Commercial sealed water is the simplest option. If you fill your own, use food-grade containers, avoid milk jugs, and rotate every six months. Label the fill date on each container.

• Food: No-cook or quick-cook staples: canned proteins, beans, oats, pasta, rice, nuts, peanut butter, powdered milk. Three days minimum, two weeks where storage allows.

• Tools: Manual can opener, matches, lighter. If you stage a camp stove, read the label first. Most butane and propane camp stoves carry an explicit warning against indoor use. Cook outdoors, or in a garage with the door open. Never in a sealed room.

• Rotation rule: Eat what you store, store what you eat. Mark dates with a marker. Avoid the “mystery pantry”: unfamiliar foods, no opener, only freezer items.

// Heat & Shelter

• CO detector first: Battery-powered or with battery backup, one on every sleeping level, tested before the season you need it. Every heating option below depends on this being in place.

• Safe heat: Catalytic or radiant propane units carrying an explicit indoor-use rating, or a solid-fuel stove with a proper flue. Never charcoal. Never a generator indoors or in an attached garage. Never a gas cooktop or oven as a room heater. CDC →

• Warmth without heat: Mylar blankets, rated sleeping bags, layered clothing. Designate the warmest interior room and move the household into it. Block door drafts with towels or blankets. Trapping heat you already have costs nothing and works while you sleep.

• Red flag: Headache, dizziness, nausea or confusion affecting more than one person at once. Suspect carbon monoxide immediately. Ventilate, get everyone outside, call emergency services. Do not go back in to investigate.

// Power & Light

• Light: Battery lanterns for rooms, headlamps for tasks. Hands-free operation is worth more than raw output once you are working. Reserve phone battery for communications.

• Power: Two power banks in rotation plus one sealed reserve you leave alone. A hand-crank or NOAA weather radio keeps information flowing once the banks run flat.

• Generators: Outdoors only, at least 20 feet from any window, door, or vent, with the exhaust pointed away from the house. Carbon monoxide from portable generators causes deaths every storm season. CDC →

• Quick test: Can you run light, radio, and phone charging for 72 hours with no grid? If not, add one more power bank or lantern. Run the test on an ordinary weekend while the shops are still open.

// Recommended: 72-Hour Kits

A pre-assembled kit takes a household from nothing to a working baseline in a single purchase. A kit you build yourself against the checklists above will fit your circumstances more closely and usually costs less. Use a commercial kit to cover the gap now, then upgrade individual components over time.

// Medicine & Health

• Medications: Seven-day minimum on hand, thirty days where prescriptions allow. Keep a printed list of prescriptions, doses, allergies and provider contacts, plus a photo copy stored offline.

• First aid: Bandages, disinfectant, gloves, oral thermometer, antihistamine, pain reliever, oral rehydration salts, and a small trauma component with tourniquet and pressure gauze. Get trained on the trauma items. A tourniquet applied wrongly under stress can cost the limb it was meant to save.

• Hygiene: Hand sanitizer, wipes, heavy-duty trash bags, and a lidded bucket with liners. Sanitation becomes urgent within the first 24 hours of losing water. Stick to familiar foods to reduce the risk of gastrointestinal upset.

• Behavioral: Keep a simple routine with fixed sleep, wake and meal times. Get daylight exposure every day. Structure lowers the stress response and preserves decision quality across a long event. Mental Resilience covers this in depth.

• Pets & dependents: Food, water and medication for three days minimum, leashes and crates, vaccination records with the go-bag. Hold a separate reserve of nutrition or medication for the very old and the very young in your care, along with infant formula, diapers, spare glasses and hearing-aid batteries where they apply.

// Recommended: First Aid & Medical

// Communication & Wayfinding

• Info cadence: Check official updates on the hour. Continuous refreshing drains battery and raises anxiety while adding little information. Rumor outpaces confirmation in the first 48 hours. See Countering Misinformation.

• Contacts: One out-of-area contact as the hub for check-ins, since local networks congest first. Agree a family rally point in advance and write it down where everyone can find it.

• Navigation: Keep paper maps and a regional road atlas. GPS and cell networks fail under the same conditions that make evacuation necessary.

// Documents, Cash & Home Safety

• Documents: Copies of identification, insurance policies, deeds, medical records and prescriptions in a waterproof container, plus an encrypted offline copy. Cloud storage depends on the network that has failed. See Digital Security & Privacy.

• Cash in small bills: Card readers and ATMs fail with the grid. Carry small denominations, since change will be scarce. Broader financial continuity is covered in Economic Resilience.

• Fire & utilities: A working extinguisher on each floor. Know where your gas, water and electrical shutoffs are. Keep the wrench that operates them beside the valve.

• Signalling & air: A whistle carries further than a shout and takes no energy to use. N95 or better masks for smoke, dust and debris. Both appear on the FEMA baseline supply list.

// Food Systems: The Rolling Pantry

A rolling pantry means eating from your reserves as part of normal life, using older goods first and replacing them regularly. A static stockpile becomes an active system. The principle is consume, replenish, repeat.

• Depth first: Extend the pantry you already use before adding specialty long-term stores. Familiar food gets eaten and rotated. Unfamiliar food sits on the shelf until it expires.

• First in, first out: New purchases go to the back. Date every item at the point of purchase. A shelf you cannot read quickly will not get rotated.

• Bulk staples: Rice, beans, oats, flour and sugar in food-grade buckets with Mylar liners and oxygen absorbers hold for years. Storage conditions matter as much as packaging, so keep them cool, dark and dry.

• Seasonings and fats: Salt, oil, stock and spices make a restricted diet sustainable past week one. They cost little, store well, and do a great deal for morale.

// Water & Sanitation: Purify and Reuse

Once stored water runs low, replenishment becomes the constraint. Rain collection, portable filters and gravity purifiers can sustain a household while utilities stay down. Boiling and chemical treatment handle microbes. Filtration handles sediment and protozoa. Use both.

• Layer the methods: Filter first to remove sediment, then boil or treat chemically. Filtration alone leaves viruses in place, and chemical treatment loses effectiveness in turbid water. CDC method →

• Rain capture: A single downspout diverter into a covered barrel produces useful volume. Keep it sealed and screened, since open water breeds mosquitoes within days. Check local regulations, as collection is restricted in some jurisdictions.

• Greywater discipline: Rinse water flushes toilets and cleans outdoors. Keep greywater and drinking water in visibly different containers and color-code them. Cross-contamination is a common failure under fatigue.

• Waste handling: A lined bucket toilet with sawdust or absorbent, or a composting system where space allows. Establish a fixed disposal point away from any water source on day one.

// Power & Fuel: Multi-Source Redundancy

Propane, wood and solar each serve different needs: cooking, heating, charging, lighting. Layer them. Solar carries the day, fuel or stored battery carries the night. Put critical devices on a charging schedule so backup power drains predictably.

• Solar by day, battery by night: A folding panel paired with a power station recharges during daylight and carries the household overnight. It is the only tier in the stack that replenishes itself.

• Ration by priority: Medical equipment, then communications, then refrigeration, then comfort. Write the order down in advance. Day nine is a poor time to be making that judgement.

• Fuel storage: Store propane and gasoline outside the living space in rated containers. Gasoline degrades within months unless stabilized. Propane keeps indefinitely, which suits mid-term planning.

• Pool at household level: Shared charging points and communal cooking cut fuel consumption sharply. One generator serving four households burns a fraction of the fuel that four generators would.

// Health & Hygiene: Sustain Body and Mind

Health at this stage is a maintenance task. Refill prescriptions early whenever the system allows. Hygiene becomes a daily discipline: clean hands, oral care, safe waste handling. Preventable illness is the dominant medical risk in extended disruption, and hygiene is where it gets controlled.

• Hand hygiene: Soap and water where available, alcohol sanitizer where not. Hand hygiene prevents more illness in a disrupted household than any other single measure.

• Rehydration: Oral rehydration salts address the most common serious complication of disrupted sanitation. Stock them in quantity. They are inexpensive, shelf-stable and highly effective.

• On stockpiling antibiotics: Where legally available they have a narrow role. They have no effect on the viral illnesses most likely in a sheltered household, they lose potency after expiry, and misuse drives resistance that outlives the emergency. Leave the decision to a prescriber.

• Mental load: Routine, daylight and physical activity reduce the fatigue and low mood that set in during extended isolation. Mental Resilience covers this in full.

// Community Integration: Shared Strength

Individual preparedness scales through connection. Neighborhood readiness groups exchange tools, information and labor, and cover gaps that no single household can cover alone. At this stage resilience is as much social as logistical. Social Resilience covers how these networks form and hold together.

• Map the block in advance: Who has medical training, a generator, a chainsaw, a truck. Who is elderly, isolated or dependent on powered equipment. The list takes an afternoon to assemble and is very hard to assemble during a crisis.

• Fixed check-in rhythm: A scheduled radio or door-knock round at set times prevents panic and surfaces problems early. Keep the schedule running even when nothing is happening.

• Rotate the burden: Water collection, security watch, cooking and childcare on a rota. Without one, the load falls on whoever volunteers first, and that person is exhausted by week two.

• One agreed meeting point: A single physical location everyone knows, chosen for accessibility, plus one fallback if the first is unreachable.

// Food and Resource Cycles

The pantry becomes a rotation system, and the rotation becomes a garden. Dried goods and canned reserves give way to local production: sprouting seeds on a windowsill, small garden plots, or coordinated community growing spaces. Drying, fermenting and pickling extend the useful life of each harvest. These are continuity skills, practised in ordinary time.

• Start while the stakes are low: A garden takes a season to produce and several seasons to produce well. The learning curve does not compress under pressure.

• Open-pollinated seed: Heirloom and open-pollinated varieties can be saved and resown each year. Hybrid seed gives one season and then needs repurchasing.

• Preserve what you grow: Dehydrating, fermenting and water-bath canning turn a glut into a reserve. Plan storage capacity alongside planting, since most of an unpreserved harvest spoils.

• Grow calories: Potatoes, beans and squash return the most energy per square foot. Salad greens add nutrients and variety while contributing few calories.

// Energy and Infrastructure Independence

In the long term, energy generation replaces energy storage. Solar arrays, small wind units and thermal mass systems reduce dependency on an unstable grid. Cooperatives of neighbors with generators or panels can support several homes at once. Maintenance becomes routine: clearing filters, cycling batteries, cleaning panels. Independence at this scale gets built through a network of households preparing together.

• Reduce load before adding supply: Insulation, LED lighting and efficient appliances cut the size of array you need. Reducing demand costs consistently less than adding generation.

• Test under load, on schedule: Run the system off-grid for a full weekend each quarter. Faults show up under real load and nowhere else.

• Thermal mass and passive design: Shading, ventilation and heat retention require no fuel and have nothing to break. Improving the building envelope reduces demand permanently.

• Cooperate on capital items: A shared well pump, chainsaw or large array becomes affordable across four households. Agree maintenance and access terms in writing while conditions are calm.

// Water, Sanitation, and Waste

Rain barrels develop into full filtration and reuse systems. Greywater becomes a managed resource, and composting or dry-waste methods replace improvisation. These systems create predictable cycles of use and renewal, reducing disease risk and extending limited supplies. Conservation works best once it is built into daily habit.

• Build the stages in order: sediment removal, then carbon for taste and chemicals, then disinfection. Each stage protects the one after it, and skipping the first shortens the life of everything downstream.

• Test what you store: Private wells warrant annual laboratory testing. Stored and harvested supply warrants test strips at each refill. Water that looks clean carries no information about what is in it.

• Check the regulations first: Composting toilets, greywater diversion and rainwater harvesting are governed by local building and health codes. Confirm the rules before installing anything permanent.

• Close the loop: Rain to storage, storage to filtration, filtration to household use, household greywater to the garden. Each output feeds the next input, and the system stops depending on anything arriving from outside.

// Social and Structural Integration

Long-term adaptation depends on shared information, skill exchange and collective responsibility. Neighborhood repair groups, seed libraries and shared maintenance workshops turn individual preparedness into local stability. The check-in system established in the mid-term phase becomes the backbone of civil continuity, linking isolated homes into an interdependent network. This is where physical resilience hands off to Social Resilience.

• Skills inventory and teaching rota: Water treatment, food preservation, basic medical care, small-engine repair. Every skill held by one person only is a point of failure in the network.

• Seed and tool libraries: Shared stock reduces duplicated cost and keeps rarely-used equipment maintained. Both work as ordinary community institutions in normal times.

• Write the agreements down: Who owns a shared asset, who maintains it, who has access, and what happens if a household leaves. Verbal understandings degrade fastest under exactly the conditions that make the asset matter.

• Connect to formal structures: Community Emergency Response Team programs, local emergency management, amateur radio clubs and mutual aid networks already exist in most areas. Joining one links your household to trained people and official information.