This is household preparedness planning. It summarizes published guidance from FEMA, CDC, the National Weather Service and equivalent bodies, and it attributes every figure to the body that sets it.

Two boundaries hold throughout. Official instructions from your local authorities take precedence over anything written here, because they have information about your specific event that a general page cannot. And where an action carries legal exposure, this page states the legal position and links the source. It offers general information, and legal questions about your own circumstances belong with a qualified attorney. See also Know the Law.

Four elements, and a plan missing any one of them will stall at the moment it is needed: the conditions that activate it, the actions that follow in sequence, the resources each action consumes, and the person responsible for each action. Everything on this page is a component of that structure.

FEMA publishes the National Risk Index, which covers 18 natural hazards at county and census tract level and combines expected annual loss, social vulnerability and community resilience into a single per-location profile. It is free and it takes minutes.

At jurisdiction level the equivalent instrument is the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment, defined in FEMA Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 201. Your state and urban area emergency management agencies complete one, and their published hazard mitigation plan is the second place to look after the National Risk Index.

No federal body publishes a document defining a 72-hour standard. What exists is a floor and a direction of travel. CDC and Ready.gov set at least a three-day supply as the minimum, and CDC pairs it with the advice to store two weeks if you can. State emergency management agencies have moved further: Washington and Wyoming both publish two-week household postures.

So the honest framing uses two containers. Three days is what the bag carries. Two weeks is what the home holds. The 72-hour kit as a named object comes out of preparedness culture, and federal doctrine never adopted the term. This page uses it as a convenient unit while attributing the floor to the body that sets it.

The federal figure is one gallon, about 3.8 liters, per person per day, covering drinking and sanitation together. Three days is three gallons, roughly 11.4 liters, and that water alone weighs about 25 pounds. Physical Resilience publishes the same figure for the home supply.

A portable bag cannot carry it, and pretending otherwise is how kits end up with a token bottle in them. The working answer is to split the requirement across three places: 2 to 3 liters carried on the person, filtration and purification tablets to extend it, and the full three gallons per person staged in the vehicle and at home. Treat every liter in the bag as a bridge to the cache, and treat the filter as the thing that makes the bridge long enough.

Use 20 percent of body weight as the working ceiling for a fit adult, which matches long-standing backpacking convention, and 15 percent for a child, which is the American Academy of Pediatrics figure for school backpacks. For context on the upper end, US Army FM 21-18 caps the fighting load at 48 pounds and ATP 3-21.8 treats anything above 45 percent of body weight as an emergency measure. Those figures describe conditioned soldiers, and a household includes people who are neither.

One bag per adult. Pack only what you cannot obtain in the first three days at your destination. Keep the bag closed for everyday needs, because a bag that gets opened is a bag that is missing something. Rotate perishables every six months and check batteries at the same time.

Medication, seven days in the bag against thirty in a pandemic. Both figures are correct for their situation and the reason is worth stating. A bag holds what you can physically rotate without letting anything expire, and most US insurance plans limit refills to 30 days with refill-too-soon controls that make deeper stockpiling difficult outside a declared emergency. Seven days is the achievable carried figure. Thirty days is the shelter-in-place target when pharmacy access is the thing at risk. Many state boards of pharmacy authorize emergency refills only after a declaration, which is worth knowing before you need one.

Cash, and why this page gives no household total. Economic Resilience establishes that no US federal body publishes a household cash figure. The one sourced comparison available is Sveriges Riksbank, which suggests roughly a week of essential purchases per adult in mixed denominations. Hold small bills, because change will be scarce and a fifty buys nothing at a stall. Two limits apply to money in a bag: the standard homeowners policy caps money, coins and stored value cards at 200 dollars, a safe does not change that, and cash carried away from the property sits outside on-premises cover entirely. The prepaid card in your document packet falls under the same cap.

For each of your top two or three scenarios, write three to five conditions and their responses. Make each condition observable or measurable, so two people would agree it had happened, and make each response concrete, time-bounded and assigned to a named person. Review them once a year. The purpose is to remove the question of whether to act while the answer still has time to matter.

Three figures on this page are household conventions with no published standard behind them, and they are marked where they appear: the ten minute departure target in Section 05, the 48 hour cash trigger in Section 05, and the two missed check-ins welfare rule in Section 05. Adopt them, adjust them or replace them. What matters is that you know which figures carry a federal body behind them and which carry only us.