Guide
Go bag
One bag you could pick up half-asleep. The top of this page is that bag. Further down, the bag does not become a grocery run. The 72 hours and the month mostly stay at home.
101 · the bag you can carry
This is not a month of food, and it is not a costume. It is what you can carry if you leave on short notice. One bag, in one place.
- Water for the trip, not for three days. The 72 hours are the next section.
- A little food you will actually eat, and any medicine you cannot skip that day. The kit and the paper list live on the medical guide.
- Copies of IDs and insurance cards. Originals stay wherever you already keep them.
- A little cash in small bills. Card readers fail when the power or the network fails.
- A light, a whistle, and a way to charge the phone. Those two tools are on the power guide, including a bank and lights that charge from it.
- Paper phone numbers. At least one person who does not live in your town.
- If a baby, a pet, or a medical device is part of the household, the bag has to admit that. Formula, a leash, spare glasses, a spare hearing-aid battery.
Ready.gov’s kit page calls this a basic disaster supplies kit and suggests one or two containers you can carry. Start smaller than you think.
201 · 72 hours, mostly not in the bag
The go bag stays the leave-now bag. Seventy-two hours at home is a second container you do not have to carry: a bin, a closet shelf, or the bottom of a coat closet.
- Water for the people in the house, using the gallon-a-day figure on 201. Three days of that is jugs, not another bottle in the backpack.
- Food you will eat for those three days, and a manual can opener.
- Hygiene that assumes the water is low: soap, wipes, trash bags, menstrual supplies, diapers, pet waste bags.
- The paper medicine list, and any extra days your pharmacist actually agreed to. That conversation is on the medical guide.
If you have to leave during those 72 hours, you still pick up the small bag. You do not strap the water jugs on and call it a go bag.
301 · a month is rotation, not a bigger backpack
A month while services come back is the stay supplies, checked, not a new shopping identity. The bag from 101 should still close.
- Use the food. Replace what you ate. Water stored and forgotten is not a supply.
- Twice a year, open the bag. Replace anything expired, including the small first-aid case. Confirm the phone numbers are still right.
- Keep the power bank and the light charged on a normal weekend, not the night the lights go out. How those work for a month is on the power guide.
- Do not advertise the bin. The people question from 101 is who knows it is there.