Week 11: Assemble a 72-hour Kit, Part 1

This week's task: Begin to assemble a portable 72-hour kit for your family.

Pretty much everyone in the disaster preparation community agrees that you should put together a portable 3-day supply of food, water, clothing, and other necessities for your family (including pets).  These are often called 72-hour kits or go-bags.

If you don't have one or your disaster supplies are not organized, now is your chance.  If you want to purchase a kit, the Red Cross offers individual and family kits.  Many other companies offer pre-assembled kits as well. Here, for example.

If you want to assemble your own kit, the following list comes from the Red Cross website:

Essential items:

• Water: We talked about water in Week 4. The recommended minimum is a gallon per person per day for 3 days (4x3=12 for a family of 4).  I have 2 gallons in a jug that I could carry on foot and 10 more gallons in 5-gallon mylar bags that I could hoist into the car.
• Food: This is a big one - I will talk specifically about it next week
• Flashlight and radio, plus extra batteries (see Week 2 and Week 9)
• First Aid kit, including any medications you require (see Week 10 for more information)
• Multi-purpose Tool
• Sanitation and Personal Hygiene Items 
• Copies of Personal Documents, Emergency Phone List, and map of the area (see Week 3)
• Cell phone with charger
• Extra Cash
• Emergency Blanket

Suggested items to help meet additional needs:

• Medical supplies (hearing aids with extra batteries, glasses, contact lenses, syringes, cane)
• Baby supplies (bottles, formula, baby food, diapers) 
• Games and activities for children 
• Pet supplies (collar, leash, ID, food, carrier, bowl) 
• Two-way radios 
• Extra set of car keys and house keys 
• Manual can opener
• Whistle 
• N95 or surgical masks 
• Matches 
• Rain gear
• Towels 
• Work gloves 
• Tools/supplies for securing your home 
• Extra clothing, hat and sturdy shoes
• Plastic sheeting (for sheltering in place)
• Duct tape 
• Scissors 
• Household liquid bleach (to purify water)
• Entertainment items 
• Blankets or sleeping bags

Rotating your supplies:  Perishable items need to replaced in your kit periodically.  If you're like me, you probably have a disaster kit you made 15 years ago that hasn't been touched since.  A couple years ago, I finally came up with a system that makes it is easy to rotate my supplies.  It takes a little effort to set up, but it works pretty well:

1. Make a list of everything in your kit and put expiration dates by the perishable items (a spreadsheet works great for this).  Setting this up is a bit of an investment, but will be worth it later.
2. Every six months, look at the spreadsheet to see what is expiring soon and make a shopping list.  (Put a reminder on your calendar and schedule the next rotation every time you do one.)
3. Go shopping, bring the stuff home, lay it on your table, and update the list with the new expiration dates. 
4. Haul out your kit (I have the food packed together in a separate bag to make it easier to swap out), switch the old for the new, and put it back.  

For me, the key to this system is that once you set it up, steps #2 and #3 are really easy, so I'm inclined not to put them off.  By the time I get to the hard step (#4), I'm almost done and it doesn't seem overwhelming. I'm not good at maintaining complicated systems, but this has worked very well for me.  If you want to see my family's list, you can download it as an Excel spreadsheet or pdf (I didn't include a detailed list of food or clothes - I'll put that up next week).