Building a 72-Hour Emergency Plan Your Family Will Actually Use

Almost everyone who prepares buys things. Almost nobody writes the page that tells the household what to do when nobody can reach anybody. That page is worth more than any single item in your kit, and it takes an evening to make.

Why 72 hours is the planning window

Three days is how long it typically takes for organised help to reach most people after a large event, and it covers the overwhelming majority of small ones outright. Plan for 72 hours properly and longer events simply become the same plan, repeated.

What you need

• One sheet of paper per household member, printed, not stored in the cloud
• An out-of-area contact who can relay messages when local networks fail
• Two meeting points and a written list of who collects whom
• Supplies sized to the plan: water, food, light, power, first aid, medication

Write the plan

1. 01

   Define the trigger. What counts as "activate the plan" — power out more than 12 hours, an evacuation order, no contact for six hours. Vague plans never start.

2. 02

   Set two meeting points. One just outside the home for fire or gas, one outside the neighbourhood for anything larger. Name them precisely, not "the park".

3. 03

   Name an out-of-area contact. Local networks congest first; a relative two hundred kilometres away can take texts from everyone and pass them on.

4. 04

   Assign roles. Who grabs the documents, who handles the children, who checks the elderly neighbour, who shuts off gas and water. Roles prevent duplication and gaps.

5. 05

   List medication and medical needs with doses, and keep two weeks' worth ahead of schedule where prescriptions allow.

6. 06

   Match supplies to the plan. 4 litres of water per person per day, food needing no cooking, light, a radio, first aid, cash in small notes.

7. 07

   Rehearse it once a year, ideally at an awkward time. A plan that has never been walked through is a wish.

The mistakes that make plans fail

• A plan that exists only on a phone
• No agreed check-in time, so everyone calls constantly
• Supplies bought but never inventoried or rotated
• Children and older relatives who have never seen the plan

Common questions

Isn't this excessive for where I live? The plan costs an evening and nothing else. Floods, storms, fires and multi-day outages happen in ordinary places every year.

How much food? Three days of food that needs no cooking, then a week of pantry staples you already eat and rotate. Nothing exotic.

Where kit is worth the money

The plan is free. What it does is tell you exactly which items you actually need, so the money you spend on water storage, light, power and first aid goes to the right places instead of an expensive pile of gear that answers no specific question.