What Belongs in a Home Emergency Kit

Emergency supplies are boring to assemble and impossible to assemble late. The purpose is narrow: to cover the interval between a service failing and it being restored, without leaving the apartment.

Water and light are the first two failures

Municipal water can be interrupted or placed under a boil notice, and in a high-rise the pumps that lift water to upper floors stop when the power does.

Stored drinking water is measured in days per person, and it costs nothing to rotate a few sealed containers through normal use so the supply is never old.

Flashlights with spare batteries, or rechargeable lights kept charged, replace the phone as a light source. A phone used as a flashlight is a phone that is now dead.

Communication depends on charge, not on coverage

Cell networks generally continue running on backup power during an outage, so the limiting factor for most people is the battery in their own device.

A charged power bank covers a day or more of limited use, and keeping it charged is a habit rather than a purchase.

A battery or hand-crank radio provides information when networks are congested, which is common in the hours after a widespread event.

Food and heat need no cooking and no power

Shelf-stable food that requires no preparation covers the case where both the stove and the microwave are unavailable, which happens in an electrical outage.

A manual can opener is the item most frequently missing, and it renders a cupboard of canned food useless when it is absent.

Never operate a grill, camp stove or generator indoors or in a garage. They produce carbon monoxide, which is the cause of a substantial share of outage-related deaths.

Documents and medication need their own plan

Copies of a lease, insurance policy, identification and account numbers, kept somewhere accessible, matter most in the situation where the apartment has to be left quickly.

Prescription medication cannot be stockpiled freely, so the practical step is knowing what you take and keeping the pharmacy information where it can be reached.

A basic first aid kit covers minor injuries during a period when routine care is harder to reach. Anything beyond minor is a call to emergency services rather than a kit.

Cash in small bills is worth keeping with the documents, because card readers and cash machines both depend on power and on a network connection that an outage removes. Stores that stay open during a long outage frequently operate on cash alone until service returns.