How this page works, and what will never appear on itNo action
Most weeks, the honest answer is that nothing has changed. We will keep saying that, in plain words, and we will not invent an item to fill the page.
United States
Whatever happens, stay warm, dry and fed.
Ready.gov asks for at least three days. FEMA asks you to build toward two weeks. It takes an afternoon to sort out, most of it is free, and none of it requires you to think about the end of the world.
Three things you can do in the next ten minutes, for nothing
01
Put your county emergency management office in your phone contacts. It is the one that actually knows your street.
02
A NOAA Weather Radio costs about $30 and works when nothing else does.
03
Photograph your ID, prescriptions and insurance and email them to yourself.
The whole idea
Nine things. That is the entire list.
Every emergency any household in the United States is realistically going to meet, from a storm to a burst main to a cyber incident at a bank, is met with the same nine things. You already own most of them.
Water
It is the only thing on this list you cannot go three days without.
Food you do not have to cook
The most common real emergency in every country we cover is a power cut.
Light
A dark house with children in it is a different kind of night.
Warmth
In winter, a house without heating drops below comfortable in hours and below safe in a day or two, especially for babies and older people..
A way to hear what is happening
In almost every incident, the shortage that hurts most is not food.
A charged phone
Your phone is your flashlight, your radio, your bank, your medical record and your way of telling people you are fine..
Medicine and first aid
A week without a repeat prescription is a much bigger problem for most households than a week without pasta..
A little cash
Card payments run on the same networks as everything else.
Your documents
Insurance claims, benefits, prescriptions, school places and border crossings all go faster when you can show the paperwork..
If it happens
What to actually do, in the first ten minutes
Written to be read on a phone, in the dark, by someone who is a bit stressed. Short sentences, in order, no theory.
Power cut
The power goes off
The ordinary emergency. Everything else on this site is really a longer version of this.
Water offThe water stops
The one thing you genuinely cannot improvise. Which is why it is the first thing on our list.
Payments and comms downCards, phones and the internet stop working
This is what most people mean now when they say cyber. It is much more boring, and much more manageable, than it sounds.
Stay putYou are told to stay indoors
The advice is the same in every country we cover, and it has been the same for fifty years, because it works.
Leaving quicklyYou have to leave in an hour
Almost everyone who has done this says the same thing afterwards. They wasted the first twenty minutes.
Cut off for a weekA week when nothing is delivered
The scenario people imagine when they hear the word preparedness. In practice it is a very boring week indoors.
MedicinesYou cannot get your medicine
For a lot of households, this is the only part of preparedness that genuinely matters.
Bad informationYou cannot tell what is true
The part of modern conflict that reaches your house first, and the only part you can beat without buying anything.
Every budget, honestly
The free plan is not the lesser plan.
Refilled bottles of tap water. A charged phone. A written list of medicines. Photographs of your documents. Knowing where the stopcock is. Two neighbours names. That is a genuine plan, it costs nothing, and it covers most of what will ever happen to you.
We price everything above that honestly, and we tell you where to stop. Most households should stop at about $45.
The Brief
Keeping up, without being wound up
We follow the news so you do not have to read it twice. Every item says what happened, what it changes for your household, and what to do. Most weeks, the honest answer is nothing.
Britain confirms a national campaign asking households to keep supplies at homeNo action
That this is now ordinary. It is the same advice Finland, Sweden, Germany and the United States have given for years, and the same advice we give here. If you have a cupboard with a few tins, some bottled water and a flashlight, you are already doing what the campaign will ask.
A deliberate fire cut power to about 40,000 Berlin households for four daysOne small thing
This is the honest reason we say three days is a floor and not a ceiling. Not because a war is coming to your street, but because a single act of sabotage in a large European capital produced a four day outage in ordinary flats, in January, with no warning.