Build a 72-Hour Emergency Kit for Under $100

Ready.gov, FEMA's public preparedness service, recommends a three-day supply of food and water in a portable kit for evacuation, plus a two-week supply kept at home. The 72-hour kit is the portable half of that, and the reason for the three-day figure is straightforward: it is roughly how long it takes for organised outside help to reach most people after a significant disaster. That window is the part you handle yourself. Covering it does not require expensive gear or specialist knowledge. It requires a clear list, about $100, and a willingness to be honest about which scenario you are actually preparing for.

Decide First: Staying or Leaving

Almost every mistake in kit-building comes from skipping this question. A kit for sheltering at home and a kit for evacuating are different objects. If you are staying, weight is irrelevant, you have a kitchen, and you should store real water in real quantity — a lidded bin in a cupboard is the correct container. If you are leaving, every pound has to be carried, water becomes the dominant constraint, and a filter earns its place. Statistically, sheltering is far more likely than evacuating for most households. The sensible resolution is to build the home kit properly and keep a smaller grab bag inside it, so that one decision at the door covers the less likely case.

Water (~$25)

FEMA's figure is at least one gallon per person per day, covering drinking and basic sanitation. For two people over 72 hours that is six gallons, roughly 23 litres, and around 50 pounds of weight — which is exactly why it is the item people skip. For a home kit, store it: supermarket bottled water is cheap and requires nothing of you at the moment of crisis. For a bag, carry what you can and add a personal filter, which covers you for freshwater sources you find along the way. The filter is a supplement to stored water, not a substitute for it, because a filter with nothing to filter is a paperweight.

Food (~$25)

The requirement is three days per person, around 2,000 calories per adult per day, and — the part that matters most — it must need no cooking. Assume no power, no gas and no clean pans. Tinned fish and beans with ring pulls, peanut butter, crackers, oat bars, nuts, dried fruit and long-life fruit juice all qualify, and all come from an ordinary supermarket shop rather than a preparedness retailer. Buy things the household already eats, because an emergency is a poor moment to discover that nobody likes the food. A couple of freeze-dried pouches are worth holding back for the case where you do have hot water, purely for morale, but they are a garnish on this budget rather than the foundation.

Light and Power (~$30)

A torch per person plus spare batteries is the baseline, and a head torch is a genuine upgrade for anyone who will need their hands. Store batteries outside the torch for long-term storage, since a slow leak will destroy the device it is sitting in. For power, a single good power bank will charge two phones several times over, which comfortably covers 72 hours of rationed use. The critical detail is maintenance: a power bank that has been in a bag for two years is not a power bank, it is a brick. Set a calendar reminder to top it up every three months, and treat that reminder as part of the kit.

First Aid (~$20) and the Part That Is Not Optional

A basic prepared kit covers cuts, burns, blisters and minor wound care, and it is worth buying rather than assembling because the packaging keeps everything sterile and findable in the dark. But open it when it arrives. A kit you have never looked inside is a box of unfamiliar objects at the worst possible moment, and ten minutes of familiarisation costs nothing. More importantly, the prepared kit is the easy half. The half that actually matters is personal: prescription medication, an inhaler, an EpiPen, spare glasses, and a written list of conditions, doses and contacts. No shop-bought kit contains any of that, and for the people who need it, it is the difference between an inconvenience and an emergency.

Warmth (~$10)

Cold is the most consistently underestimated hazard in a short emergency, partly because it arrives slowly and partly because it is unglamorous. Emergency mylar blankets are cheap, weigh almost nothing and fold to the size of a phone, which makes them very easy to include — but understand what they do. They reflect radiated body heat back at you and block wind, which is useful; they provide no insulation of their own and they are no substitute for clothing. The real warmth layer is a hat, gloves, and one complete change of dry clothes per person, because wet clothing is what turns a cold night into a dangerous one.

Information and Money (~$20)

Two items cost little and are routinely left out. The first is a radio. Mobile networks degrade during extended outages as mast batteries run down, and when they do, a battery or hand-crank radio is how you find out what has happened and when it will be fixed — which is the information that drives every other decision. Tune it to a working station before it goes in the bag. The second is cash, in small notes. Card terminals and cash machines fail with power and connectivity, and a shop that is open and stocked may still be unable to take a card. Neither item is exciting, and both are more useful in the first 72 hours than most of what people spend real money on.

Documents, and the Fifteen Minutes That Save Months

This is the free part of the kit and the one people regret skipping. Copies of passports, driving licences, insurance policies, tenancy or mortgage paperwork, prescriptions and bank details, in a waterproof bag, with photographs of the same on your phone and in cloud storage. It adds nothing to the weight and costs nothing but an afternoon. Its value shows up in the weeks after an emergency rather than during it: proving who you are, making a claim, replacing what was lost. Add a short written list of emergency contacts too, on paper, since a dead phone takes every number you know with it.

Putting It Together and Keeping It Alive

Store everything in one place — a large backpack or a lidded plastic bin — and keep it somewhere you can reach in the dark, by the door or in a hall cupboard, not buried at the back of a loft. A kit distributed across three rooms is not a kit. Then diarise a review twice a year: rotate the food and water, test the torch, recharge the power bank, check the medication is current, and update anything that has changed about the household. This is the step that separates a working kit from a decorative one. Almost every failed emergency kit failed not because the wrong things were bought, but because nobody opened it for four years.