72-Hour Emergency Supplies Checklist

Build the bag you will actually carry

Work the builder group by group and tick anything you already own. Most households hold half the power list and a good share of the warmth list somewhere in a cupboard already. When the gaps shrink to a short list, work through the links. Each one opens live options, so you can pick what suits your frame and your climate.

Then weigh the result. A sensible ceiling for one adult is roughly a fifth of body weight, and children and smaller adults should carry less. If the bag is over that mark, do not buy a stronger strap — cut items. Three days away from home is won with water, warmth, a charged phone and a first-aid kit. Almost everything else is negotiable.

A go bag is finished when it is light enough to walk with, not when the shop runs out of ideas.

Why seventy-two hours, and what it assumes

The three-day target reflects how relief usually moves. In the first hours after an evacuation, services are busy, roads are full and shops near you may be shut or stripped. By the third day you are likelier to have reached a fixed point: a relative's sofa, a shelter, a hotel, a working till. The bag's job is to carry you across that gap without asking anyone for help yet.

The same horizon is also honest about weight. Food and water for a week would take two carriers and a trolley. Three days fits one bag. If your realistic plan is to shelter at home instead, a longer stock makes sense. But that is a different list, and the two plans should not be merged into one pack.

One assumption deserves a warning label: the bag only works if you grab it. Store it by the exit, not in the back of a cupboard, and make sure every adult knows it is there and what is inside. A perfect kit nobody can find in the dark is still a perfect kit nobody uses.

Water and food on the move

Carrying three days of water for a household is a weight you will refuse anyway, so plan the arithmetic differently. Roughly two litres per person per day covers drinking while you are moving and hot. Carry the first day in hard or soft bottles. Then carry tablets or a small filter to treat water along the rest of your route, from taps, tanks or streams that are confirmed safe.

Food should be edible at walking pace, survive being crushed, and need no stove, fridge or ceremony. Energy bars, nut butter, dried fruit and crispbread cover most people for three days without cooking. Check your own tolerance first: a sudden change of diet on a stressful day is its own small emergency. Add one true comfort item per person, because the last evening of a long day is when morale needs feeding too.

Rule of thumb: Treat water, do not haul it. Tablets and a filter weigh grams; three days of bottles weighs kilograms.

Power, light and staying found

A charged phone is a map, a wallet and a torch. It is also the way your family finds each other, so its power budget earns real space in the bag. A power bank that recharges a phone two or three times covers most of a three-day window with room left over. If someone in your household runs a medical device overnight, that is a larger problem with a larger battery. Size it against the device's real draw, not a headline number on a box.

Light follows the same logic in reverse: you need it to move, not to furnish. A headlamp keeps both hands free for zips, steps and ropes. A small lantern makes a stopped car or a shelter corner livable at night. A whistle is the cheapest signal you will ever pack — it throws a voice three times as far and never runs out.

Charge beats carry: a battery bank and a headlamp do more over three days than a bigger torch ever will.

Warmth, shelter and the forgotten third day

Go bags are usually packed in a warm living room for an imagined warm day. The third day is where that fantasy fails. You sleep somewhere that is not your bed, your shoes are damp, and the night runs far colder than the forecast promised. One warm layer, a rain shell, dry socks and an emergency blanket per person solve most of that for less weight than a second jacket.

Then add the small fixes that only appear on day three. Gloves for hauling debris, a multi-tool for repairs, matches for a permitted fire, and a printed contact card for the moment the phone dies. None of them looks important at packing time. All of them are the difference between managing and being stuck.

The personal layer and the peace-of-mind extras

The heaviest obligation in any go bag is the part no generic list can write for you. A prescription with no buffer, a spare pair of glasses, infant formula, or pet food and a carrier. A dietary need. These are the items that turn a three-day inconvenience into a medical event. Keep a small stock of each, with a copy of any script, and refresh them on the same schedule as the rest of the bag.

Then budget for the quiet extras that pay off. Photograph your documents to a secure drive, so a lost bag becomes a paperwork job instead of a crisis. Add a deck of cards, or a small thing that keeps a child calm. Weight allowance permitting, the difference between a kit and a plan is the parts that keep people settled while the adults work the problem.

Staying in touch and getting back home

A go bag is only half of an evacuation plan. The other half is knowledge that costs almost no weight. Agree a meeting point everyone knows by name, and one contact who lives far enough away to stay reachable when local lines are jammed. Every family member should carry the same two pieces of information on paper, because a dead phone takes both with it. A wind-up radio closes the other gap. It carries official instructions about what is safe, and when it is safe to return.

Plan the return as carefully as the exit. Roads may reopen before bridges do, and your own street may be blocked or quarantined. Keep a copy of utility shut-off instructions with the documents, photograph the state of your home before you leave if there is a moment, and note the number your insurer asks for after an event. Households that rehearse the way back argue far less on day three than households that only rehearsed the way out.

The bag carries your supplies. A meeting point, a paper contact card and a battery radio carry your ability to reunite.