Every supply in a 72-hour kit, post by post.

The first mistake of a nighttime outage is lighting the house with a phone: three hours later, the only link you have to the outside world is dead. You need one source per person and one for the room everyone ends up in. What fails, in what order, and at what hour is the subject of the extended power outage.

• A headlamp each, not a flashlight for the house. A headlamp frees both hands — you cook, you carry a child, you dig through a box — and the red mode lets someone move at three in the morning without waking the room. One AAA headlamp^aff. per person, stored in one fixed place everybody knows.
• The light you set on the table. Three evenings of pointing beams into each other's eyes and a house becomes unlivable. A warm-light LED lantern^aff. lights a room instead of a spot — and it replaces candles, which are a leading cause of house fires during outages.
• Batteries, which decide everything else. Alkalines leak in a drawer within a few years and destroy the device they were meant to power. Lithium primary batteries^aff. hold for about a decade and lose almost nothing in the cold — this is the one consumable on the page where the cheap option costs more by the time you need it.

When the cell network goes — saturation, towers on dead backup batteries, a cut fiber — the National Weather Service keeps broadcasting. That is why Ready.gov's basic kit list names two separate things: a battery-powered or hand-crank radio, and a NOAA Weather Radio with tone alert. How to choose between the technologies is covered in the emergency weather radio.

• The receiver that wakes you up. The tone alert is the whole point: a radio you have to remember to switch on is a radio that stays off at 2 a.m., which is when tornado warnings arrive. A NOAA Weather Radio with SAME alerting^aff. can be set to your county code so it stays silent for the next county over — the feature that stops people unplugging it after a week.
• The one that cannot run out. Crank, small solar panel, batteries: three sources in one body is exactly what you want on the device your information depends on. A hand-crank and solar emergency radio^aff. doubles as a lamp and a charger — poor output on that last count, but enough for one phone call.
• Paper, which never fails. Your county's alert frequency, the out-of-area contact, the meeting point, the time of the last bulletin you heard: none of that should live only inside a phone at four percent. Wireless Emergency Alerts reach the phone, but they are a push, not a record. A waterproof notebook and a pencil^aff. beat a ballpoint, which refuses to write on a wet page. Same reasoning as navigating without GPS: keep one version that depends on no battery.

Three uses, three very different answers: keeping phones alive for three days, running a router and a few lamps, or holding a full freezer. The first costs about as much as dinner out; the third is a real decision, and it is the subject of the power station versus the generator.

• The power bank, the only mandatory purchase here. Around 20,000 mAh it recharges a phone four or five times, which is the difference between three days informed and three days blind. A dual-port USB-C power bank^aff. refills from a car outlet, and wants checking twice a year.
• The car, a generator you already paid for. Half a tank is several days of charging for the whole household. What is usually missing is the dual USB-C car charger^aff., and it is usually missing because it lives in the glovebox of the vehicle that is somewhere else.
• The power station, when the housing calls for it. In an apartment a gas generator is simply out of the question. A LiFePO4 portable power station^aff. around 500 Wh runs a router, lamps and one small appliance intermittently, with no combustion and no noise. Without a panel it is just a large battery: a foldable solar panel^aff. makes it renewable, slowly, even under overcast sky.
• The generator, and the rule that comes with it. For a house with a well pump, a sump pump or a freezer worth saving, a generator is the right answer — and it arrives with a non-negotiable condition. Ready.gov is explicit: generators and fuel are used outdoors only, at least twenty feet from windows, doors and attached garages. Not in the garage with the door open. Not on a covered porch. Twenty feet, outside, every single time.

A house with no heat drifts toward the outside temperature in a day or two depending on how well it is built. The buying order is counterintuitive: you dress and sleep warm before you burn anything. The options, their limits and their hard stops are sorted in heat without power. The opposite problem, in July, has its own page: getting through a heat wave without AC.

• Sleeping warm, the cheapest solution there is. A living room at 54 °F is perfectly livable with the right bag and perfectly miserable without one. A sleeping bag rated around 30 °F^aff. per person settles the night — read the comfort rating, never the “extreme” number, which is a marketing figure.
• Reflective, and reusable. Disposable foil blankets tear on the first night. A heavy reusable emergency blanket^aff. survives handling, staples over a broken window, and closes off a room so you heat a smaller volume.
• The detector, before the appliance. The moment anything burning comes inside — a kerosene heater, a propane unit, a stove left on for warmth — it is the carbon monoxide detector^aff. that makes the rest acceptable. Ready.gov asks for working CO detectors on every level of the home. Carbon monoxide has no smell and no color, and it puts people to sleep before it kills them: no trick substitutes for a detector, ventilation, and leaving at the first doubt. February 2021 in Texas is the case study nobody should need twice — the deaths did not all come from the cold, they came from what people burned indoors to escape it.
• Supplemental heat, last and conditionally. Past four or five people, sleeping bags stop being enough to keep a house livable for three days. An indoor-rated propane heater with an oxygen depletion sensor and tip-over shutoff^aff. runs with a window cracked and a detector on, never in a room where someone is sleeping and never in a sealed house. Grills, charcoal, camp stoves and generators do not come inside — not into the house, not into the garage, under any circumstances.

Ready.gov puts numbers on the countdown: a closed refrigerator keeps food cold for about four hours, a full freezer holds its temperature for about forty-eight. After that, anything that sat at 40 °F or higher for two hours goes in the trash. What you need is nine meals a person that require no cold and no long cooking — and something to boil water on. Going from three days to several weeks, with the calorie math, is handled in long-term food storage.

• What can be eaten cold. The rule that decides everything: store what you already eat. A reserve nobody likes never rotates, expires, and goes in the bin. A mixed lot of shelf-stable canned meals^aff. covers most of the need, and the pantry covers the rest.
• The item everyone forgets. Thirty cans and nothing to open them with is the most ordinary failure on this page — and the reason a manual can opener appears by name on Ready.gov's basic list. Buy two stainless manual can openers^aff., keep one in the go bag, and the problem is gone for good.
• Something hot. One hot meal changes the mood of a cold house, and boiled water solves half of the water problem. A propane camp stove with piezo ignition^aff. and four canisters is enough — used outdoors, like everything that burns.
• The thermometer that settles arguments. “It still feels cold” is not a food safety standard; 40 °F is. An appliance thermometer^aff. in the fridge and one in the freezer turn a guess into a reading, which is what stops a household throwing out food it could have kept — or keeping food it should not have.

During an emergency the pharmacy is closed or stripped and 911 is saturated. The post splits in two: what you buy off a shelf, and what you discuss with a physician. The two do not mix.

• The kit, complete rather than large. Gauze, bandages, tape, antiseptic, tweezers, shears, gloves: a complete first aid kit^aff. covers what a household can legitimately handle alone. Past a superficial wound, it is the doctor, the pharmacist, or 911.
• Hygiene, the real health problem. With the water off it is not injuries that cause trouble, it is everything else. Body wipes and hand sanitizer^aff. keep a household clean for three days for almost nothing. In an apartment, add gelling waste bags^aff.: a water outage puts the toilet out of service within hours, and that is the practical problem people are least ready for.
• Breathing, when the air loads up. Wildfire smoke, post-disaster dust, a bad air-quality day: a cloth mask does nothing against fine particulates, and a NIOSH-approved N95 respirator^aff. does. Ready.gov lists a dust mask on the basic kit for exactly this; the N95 is the version that works. It is also the first line of the shelter-in-place kit described in protecting a home from wildfire.

The cheapest post of the whole kit, and the one whose absence costs the most afterward: papers are destroyed in an hour and replaced over months. FEMA and Operation HOPE publish a whole workbook for it, the Emergency Financial First Aid Kit, and the list it asks for is longer than people expect: household identification, birth certificates, Social Security cards, insurance policies, housing paperwork, tax statements, medical and physician information, and the contact details of every bank and service provider you deal with. The full inventory, household by household, is in important documents in an emergency.

• The copies, in an envelope that does not mind water. Ready.gov's financial guidance sends you to a safe deposit box, an external drive or the cloud. That covers theft and fire; it does not cover the case where you have ninety seconds to leave. A waterproof letter-size document pouch^aff. near the door does, and it is the one thing on this page you assemble in an evening and never redo.
• The backup that needs no network. The cloud is unreachable with no power and no mobile data. Scans on a hardware-encrypted USB drive^aff. — with a PIN that does not live in the browser that saved it — settle the question. One copy at home, one with someone you trust outside the area.
• Cash, in small bills. Ready.gov is direct about this: keep a small amount of cash at home, in small bills, because ATMs and card readers may not work when you need fuel, food or supplies. A card is useless at a gas station running on its own generator with the network down, and nobody at a roadside stand can break a fifty.
• The originals, protected from fire and water. When several people's papers sleep in one place, a fireproof and waterproof document box^aff. is what stands between them and a small fire, or a foot of water. Which is exactly the scene described in what to do in a flood: you go up, and you take the pouch.

The eight posts above stay in the house. This one leaves with you, and leaving is more common than people assume. The Camp Fire reached Paradise, California on the morning of November 8, 2018; by the time it was contained it had burned 153,336 acres and 18,804 structures. Leaving changes every rule: weight becomes the first criterion, and you carry the means to produce a resource rather than the resource itself. The detailed contents and the weighing are in the go bag checklist; what stays on your person day to day belongs to everyday carry essentials.

• One bag per carrier, loaded to 10–15 % of body weight. A grocery tote does not survive two hundred yards and occupies both hands, which need to be free. A 35–45 liter pack with a padded hip belt^aff. moves the load onto the hips — it is the belt that matters, not the brand.
• The means, not the resource. Three days of water on your back is twenty-five pounds a person: impossible. You leave with a quart and the ability to make more, so a filter bottle with an integrated element^aff. per person, handling bacteria and protozoa at the source.
• Be heard, and stay dry. You can shout for three minutes or blow a whistle for three hours — Ready.gov puts a whistle on the basic list for that reason. A pealess emergency whistle^aff. around each child's neck on the day you leave together. And two hours in the rain outside a reception center turns a manageable evacuation into hypothermia: a reusable rain poncho^aff. per person weighs less than an apple.