DayCount Supply — household supply planner

People

2 adults, 1 child, 1 toddler

Water, 90 days

450

gallons total need

Calories / day

7,200

648,000 over 90 days

Store now

126

gallons = 4 weeks on hand

Your supply list

Scales live with the household above.

Water

One gallon per person per day covers drinking and basic sanitation — roughly half and half. Storing the whole horizon is impractical for most homes, so store two to four weeks and cover the rest with collection and purification. Never ration drinking water unless you are told to.

The hot-climate figure is a floor, not a ceiling

With the heat toggle on, this page adds 50% for a hot-climate summer with no air conditioning. Ready.gov and the FEMA/Red Cross guidance both say water needs can double in very hot conditions, so treat 1.5× as the minimum and 2× as the figure to plan against if you have anywhere to store it. Nursing adds roughly a third of a gallon a day on top of that. Children need less fluid by volume than adults but overheat faster — their risk is cooling, not drinking volume.

Item	You need	Notes

Food

Quantities below are calorie-complete for 90 days, which is more than most starter lists carry. Buy foods your household already eats and build up gradually — a crisis is the wrong time to introduce new food to a small child.

Preserving: buy the jars, skip the canning

Glass jars are genuinely useful here — they are the best container for anything you have already opened, and they beat a folded bag in humidity. Home canning is a different proposition, and it does not survive contact with this scenario.

The fuel arithmetic kills it first. One pressure-canner load runs roughly two hours near maximum output once you count venting, coming up to pressure, the process time itself and the natural cool-down. That is about two and a half days of the cooking fuel this page budgets you, out of a whole-horizon allowance.
Low-acid food needs 240°F. Vegetables, meat, poultry and fish can only be canned safely under pressure, never in a boiling-water bath. Home-canned vegetables are the most common identified cause of botulism in the United States, and you cannot see, smell or taste the toxin. Grid-down there is no antitoxin and no ventilator — the 2018 New York case ran 34 to 54 days of intensive care for three people.
Fermenting fails in the heat. It wants 70–75°F for three to four weeks and goes soft above 80°F, so it does not work in an un-air-conditioned house in summer. Refrigerator pickles are not shelf-stable at all — they are a month in a fridge you do not have.
Lids are single-use and the sealing compound degrades in about five years, so any canning-based plan needs hundreds of lids running down their own expiry clock.

Canning is a harvest technology, not a siege technology, and grid-down there is no harvest. The one real use case — a freezer thawing out — is exactly the low-acid, high-stakes job where mistakes are made. Put the money into mylar, oxygen absorbers and buckets instead. If you want preserving capability regardless, store 4–5 lb of canning salt separately from the culinary salt above, and never use a potassium salt substitute in a fermenting brine.

Item	You need	Notes

MREs & long-term food

Packaged emergency food earns its place in two situations: the first days when there is no water or fuel to cook with, and the long tail where you want something that keeps for decades without thought. It is a poor way to buy bulk calories — rice and beans beat every kit by four to ten times per calorie — so the sensible plan uses staples for the backbone and kits for the layer staples can't do.

The servings trick, and the number that defeats it

This industry sells duration, prices by serving, and frequently means neither. A "serving" is often 137 to 214 calories, so a kit sold as three months can work out to well under what an adult eats in a day. This is not a theory: Wise Company was sued over exactly this and settled in 2020, agreeing to stop making duration claims unless kits provide at least 2,000 calories a day. They now trade as ReadyWise.

Ignore the name on the box and do one division: total kit calories ÷ (2,300 × people). If the vendor does not publish total calories, that silence is the answer.

For your household	You need	Notes

What each category is actually for

Type	Cost per 1,000 cal	Water needed	Good for / bad for
Bulk staples rice, beans, oats	$0.40–0.90	Yes, plus fuel and time	Four to ten times cheaper than any kit and should be most of your calories past two weeks. Useless for evacuation, nutritionally incomplete alone, and monotony is a real documented failure.
USCG lifeboat bars Datrex, SOS, Mainstay	$2.36–4.04	None	The right answer for a car kit or go-bag anywhere warm: ~2,320 cal per pound, no prep, and rated to 300°F so a hot car doesn't kill them. Five-year life, monotonous, little protein.
Freeze-dried buckets	$2.30–5.20	A lot — 35 to 180 gallons per kit	The only realistic option past six months. But in a water emergency your food is inert, and this is where the serving-count games live. Check the water figure before buying.
MREs military-style, civilian clones	$3.50–6.50	None	The only thing that works with zero water, fuel, utensils or skill, and the best protein of any category at 40–45 g a meal. Heaviest per calorie, very high sodium, near-zero fiber. The military caps them at 21 days as sole nutrition.
Freeze-dried pouches	$16–28	Yes	Backpacking food at backpacking prices — 30 to 60 times bulk rice per calorie. Fine on a trail, wrong for storage. Where a brand sells both, buy its cans and buckets instead.
Compressed tabs	$10–11	None	At roughly 240 calories a day these are a calorie supplement for a bag, not a food supply. Worst value in the category, and the chewable form is a choking risk under four.

Heat is the whole ballgame — never the garage

MRE shelf life is quoted at three to five years, but the Army's own time-temperature data makes clear that is a storage-temperature claim, not a property of the food. Worse, heat damage is cumulative: months spent hot are permanently banked against the remaining life even after you move the box somewhere cool.

Storage temperature	MRE shelf life	What that is in practice
60°F	10.8 years	—
70°F	8.3 years	Inside the air-conditioned house
80°F	6.3 years	A warm interior closet
90°F	4.6 years	Garage in spring
100°F	1.8 years	Garage in summer
110°F	5 months	Attic, or a garage in August
120°F	1 month	Unventilated attic, car interior

An uncooled garage in a hot climate gives MREs one to two real years, not five. Inside the conditioned house they get seven or eight. The 25-year freeze-dried ratings assume room temperature too — and are based on the most stable thing in the bucket, so anything with meat, dairy or oil fails far sooner than the rice beside it. Two further honest notes: most vitamins are gone by year five even while the calories hold for decades, and oil and dried eggs should be rotated within a couple of years whatever the bucket says.

Store inside the air-conditioned envelope. Interior closet, under beds, interior-wall pantry. Not the garage, attic, shed, or against a west-facing wall. This single choice matters more than which brand you buy.
Put a $12 min/max thermometer where you plan to store it and watch it through one summer before spending real money.
Off the slab — pallet or shelving. Concrete transmits heat and moisture.
Split by heat tolerance. USCG bars live in the car and garage; MREs and freeze-dried stay inside.
Transit heat degrades fats, not starches. Rice, wheat, beans and oats tolerate a hot truck fine, so order staples whenever. Freeze-dried meat, dairy powder and anything oily do not — time those for cooler months. Lifeboat bars are the exception; they are engineered for it.
If you repackage into mylar yourself, do it on a dry day with the A/C running. Humidity sealed into the bag defeats the oxygen absorber, and you will not find out for years.
Inspect stored grain before you eat it. Long-stored grain and nuts can develop aflatoxin, a mould toxin you cannot cook out. Any off smell, visible mould, caking or discolouration means throw it out rather than sort it — and that risk rises with exactly the heat and humidity an uncooled garage provides.
MREs carry a four-digit Julian pack date, not an expiry. Learn to read it, write the date on the case, and rotate every three to four years in a hot climate regardless of the printed claim.

Where the calories are cheapest

Most of your calories should come from bulk staples, and the value gap against packaged kits is not close. Verified prices:

Source	Price	Calories per dollar
Costco, long-grain rice, 50 lb	$22.99	~3,600
Costco, pinto beans, 25 lb	$18.49	~2,100
Home Storage Center, hard red wheat, 6 × #10 cans	$34.68	~1,400
Palouse Brand, 175 lb bundle, shipping included	$452.38	~580
Branded freeze-dried kits	—	~190–430

Warehouse-club staples that you repackage yourself in mylar with oxygen absorbers run roughly two to three times cheaper per calorie than the cheapest pre-packed option, and more than ten times cheaper than kits. What you pay instead is labour, and the risk of a bad seal. If you go that route, buy the mylar and absorbers at the same time — the advice is incomplete without them.

Suppliers

These exist and are established. Verify them yourself against the checks above — this page does not vouch for any company, and a list like this goes stale. The arithmetic is what protects you: it works on a vendor nobody here has heard of.

Supplier	What to know before you buy
Costco · Sam’s Club	The best calories per dollar available, and the freight is already absorbed into warehouse distribution — which matters most if you are far from Utah, Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, where most of this industry ships from. You repackage into mylar yourself.
Home Storage Centers Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints	Bulk staples in sealed #10 cans at close to cost, and open to non-members — the Church states this on its own page. Self-canning has been discontinued, so everything is prepackaged; card only. Buying in person runs about 12% cheaper than ordering online, because the web price has shipping built in. Their 30-year rating is explicitly conditional on storage below 75°F.
SOS Food Lab	Manufactured in Hialeah Gardens, Florida — short transit and local availability in hurricane season. Operating since 1984. They also own the Mainstay brand, so those are one supplier and not two independent options.
My Patriot Supply	Their kits do carry around 2,000 cal/day, which not all do. Run the arithmetic anyway: the 3-month kit is 180,840 calories, which is 79 days at a 2,300 rate rather than 90. The permanent “reduced from” pricing means the sale price is simply the price.
Augason Farms	They publish calories per day on the product page, which most don’t — use it. Their “1-Year” kit runs 1,290 cal/day, about 6.7 months for one adult, so buy roughly 1.8× the advertised duration. Buy through Walmart or Sam’s Club rather than the brand site: cheaper, and it avoids freight on heavy cans. Shares a parent with Emergency Essentials, so those two are not an independent price comparison.
Palouse Brand	Wheat, lentils and chickpeas in 25 lb buckets, arriving storage-ready. Dearer per calorie than warehouse staples, but shipping is included, which changes the arithmetic considerably if you are shipping across the country.
Country Life Natural Foods	Operating since 1967. Organic bulk grains and beans, free shipping over $99, and closer to the eastern US than the Utah cluster.
Datrex	Lifeboat rations, manufacturing since 1970. Cheap per calorie, engineered for heat, five-year life — the right thing for cars and go-bags. Note that USCG approvals run five years and expire, so treat any vendor’s “USCG approved” badge as a claim to check rather than a standing fact.
Sopakco · Ameriqual · Wornick	The only three companies that make MREs for the US military; their civilian lines are Sure-Pak, APack and Eversafe. Buy from them directly. Private-label “military-style” cases frequently run about 500 calories a meal against roughly 1,200 for the real thing, and sometimes cost more — so check calories per meal before ordering.

What no kit covers, and who it hurts

Protein. Freeze-dried kits run 5–8 g a serving, roughly 40–60 g a day — at or under the adult RDA, and well under what you need while clearing debris in the heat. Buy protein separately: canned meat, peanut butter, dry milk.
Sodium, and this is the sharp one. A day of kit food can run 3,500–5,000 mg. It raises your drinking-water requirement exactly when water is scarce, and it is directly dangerous with hypertension, heart failure or kidney disease. A toddler's upper limit is around 1,200–1,500 mg a day — one 700 mg side dish is half of it. MREs and freeze-dried entrees are not suitable as a staple for a one-to-three year old.
Vitamins. Mostly degraded by year five even in a 25-year bucket. The label on an old bucket is fiction. Rotate a multivitamin every two to three years.
Allergens, and the labels themselves. Wheat, soy and dairy are near-universal; MREs usually contain peanut. Worse, this category has a track record of labelling failures — including a “pork-free” ration line later found to contain pork across lots spanning three years, and a 60,000 lb recall for undeclared milk. If someone in the house has an allergy or keeps halal, kosher or pork-free, do not rely on a mixed kit’s label. Buy a dedicated single-ingredient supply you can inspect yourself, and store two epi-pens with the food.
Never dilute infant formula to stretch it. It causes water intoxication and seizures, and it is a documented emergency failure. Store ready-to-feed, which needs no water at all.

Before you spend real money

Buy one small unit of whatever you are considering and actually eat it. Taste, salt level, water needed and whether your children will touch it are all things you want to discover now rather than on day four.

Cooking & fuel

Fuel is sized by burner hours, not by calories, so it gets its own table. If your range is electric, this is the difference between hot food and cold cans for however long the grid is down.

Item	You need	Notes

Everything that burns fuel goes outside

Camp stoves, grills and charcoal all produce carbon monoxide. Outdoors only — not in a garage, not in a carport, not on a screened porch, not with the windows open. The same rule as the generator, for the same reason.

If your home has a natural gas line

A gas range usually keeps working through a power outage; only the electronic igniter dies, and a match solves that. Two exceptions: shut the gas off at the meter if you smell a leak or the structure is damaged, and don't assume service continues — gas can be interrupted independently of electricity. Keep the propane backup either way.

Kitchen, cleaning & household

The quiet category. Everything above assumes you can cook the food, wash the pot and bag the rubbish, and almost no preparedness list budgets any of it. A household living indoors for months generates a startling amount of washing-up and waste, and runs out of dish soap long before it runs out of rice.

Item	You need	Notes

Infant & toddler

Stress commonly causes regression, so budget high rather than low. Dehydration from diarrhea is the single biggest risk to a small child in a prolonged emergency.

Item	You need	Notes

Medical & hygiene

Item	You need	Notes

Power, cooling & tools

A house without power slowly becomes whatever the weather outside is. In a hot-climate summer an unpowered home can pass 95°F indoors; in a cold-climate winter it falls toward the outside temperature over a day or two. Small children and older adults lose ground fastest in both directions, because they regulate temperature poorly and say less about it. Which way your risk runs is set by the climate toggle at the top — the cooling and heating sections below follow it.

Item	You need	Notes

Cooling: what actually works

This is the part of the plan most likely to be bought wrong. Battery power stations are excellent at some things and useless at others, and the gap between the two is where a heat-vulnerable household gets hurt.

A battery station will not run air conditioning

A 5,000 BTU window unit draws about 450W running; 8,000 BTU draws 660–800W, with a startup surge of 2,000–4,000W that many 1,000W stations cannot even deliver. Allowing for inverter losses, a 2,000Wh station gives you under 4 hours on the small unit and 2 to 3 on the larger one — and in a 95°F house the compressor runs near continuously, so those are the real numbers, not the optimistic ones. A family that buys a 2,000Wh station expecting to cool a bedroom overnight for a toddler will find it dead by around 1am. Air conditioning needs a generator. Battery stations are for fans, phones, lights and a CPAP.

Above a heat index of 99°F, a fan makes things worse

EPA guidance is explicit: using a portable electric fan when the heat index passes about 99°F increases the heat stress on the body rather than relieving it, because you are blowing hot air across skin and accelerating dehydration. A Miami August afternoon indoors can sit well past that. Above that threshold a fan only helps if it is pulling genuinely cooler outside air in. Otherwise the answer is wetting the skin, drinking, and leaving — not more airflow.

Have a cooling-center plan. For a household with a toddler, a senior, or anyone on medication that affects heat tolerance, "we have fans" is not a cooling plan. Know in advance where you will go, and treat leaving as the normal move rather than the failure.

Numbers worth knowing before you buy

Inverter losses are real. A 1,000Wh station delivers about 850Wh through its AC outlet. Small fans should run off the DC or USB ports — the inverter's own standby draw of 5–15W swamps a 3W fan.
Fan draw: 20-inch box fan 60–85W, pedestal fan 33–45W, rechargeable clip fan 2–5W, USB fan 2W. The clip fan is 20 times more efficient than the box fan and is what makes overnight cooling survivable on battery.
Solar reality: a 100W panel measures about 75–80W in full sun and 10–30W under cloud. Real daily harvest is 200–300Wh on a good day, 50–150Wh under the overcast that follows a storm. Refilling a 1,000Wh station takes 3–5 days on one 100W panel. Budget 400W of panel if you want to cycle a station nightly.
Fridge: 1.0 kWh/day for an efficient modern unit, 1.5–1.9 for a large or older one, and plan on 1.5× the label in a hot house. A 1,000Wh station cannot cover a full day. Run the fridge off the generator in 2–4 hour bursts, 2–3 times a day, door shut. Cycling does not reduce the daily kWh — it just lets a small source cover it in chunks.
Buy LiFePO4, not NMC. Roughly 3,000 cycles against 500, and a 113°F ceiling against 104°F. An uncooled garage in summer sits above NMC's rated limit. Keep the station in the conditioned house, at 50–80% charge, and cycle it every three months.

Heating: what actually works

Cold is the quiet killer in a long outage, and it kills differently from heat. In the Texas freeze of February 2021, 246 people died: 64% of them from hypothermia, another 8% from carbon monoxide, and nearly 60% of the dead were over 60. Almost none of that was exposure outdoors. It happened indoors, in houses, over days.

You cannot store 90 days of heat

This is the same wall the generator hits, and it is harder. Residential fire codes typically cap propane around 25 gallons and kerosene around 60, both outside the house only — and cylinders over a pound generally may not be kept indoors or in an attached garage at all, with empty tanks counted as full.

Fuel	Realistically storable	Days of 8 hr/day supplemental heat
Propane, 20 lb tanks	~5 tanks (25 gal)	~71 days at 4,000 BTU, ~31 days at 9,000
Kerosene	60 gal	~44 days at 23,000 BTU
Cord wood	No volume cap	The only fuel that genuinely reaches 90 days — but only with an installed, code-compliant stove or insert. Roughly 2 cords to hold one well-sealed room for 90 days, around 5 for a modest house in a cold climate. Five cords is a stack 4 ft × 4 ft × 40 ft.

So what do you actually do

Stop treating heat as a stockpile problem. Store around 30 days of fuel, not 90, and spend the rest of the budget on not needing it.
Buy your way out with insulation and sleeping systems. A sleeping bag has no refill problem. This is the single best use of a heating budget.
Live in one room. Close off everything else, stuff towels under the doors, cover the windows with blankets at night. Pick the smallest room with interior walls, fewest windows, not a basement, near the heat source and within reach of a CO alarm.
Decide your leaving trigger in advance. Federal guidance for infants is explicit: if you cannot keep the home warm, make arrangements elsewhere. A 90-day winter plan without a departure point is not a plan.

Sleeping bags — read the right number

ISO-rated bags carry three temperatures and the big one on the packaging is usually the wrong one. Comfort is where an average woman sleeps comfortably. Limit is where an average man gets through the night curled up. Extreme is a survival-only rating that assumes hypothermia risk and frostbite is possible.

Buy on the Comfort rating and match it to the coldest night you expect indoors, not the average. Never buy on Extreme.
The ratings assume one base layer and an insulating pad underneath. A bag on a cold floor does not perform at its rating.
Comfort is calibrated to a 60 kg woman, Limit to a 73 kg man. Smaller, older and less active people sleep colder than the label suggests.
A bag that is too warm can be vented. A bag that is too cold cannot be fixed.

Who gets cold first, and the numbers that matter

Infants under one must never sleep in a cold room. And here the usual answer is wrong: loose blankets are a suffocation risk, so the remedy is an extra layer of clothing or a wearable sleep sack, never bedding. Hypothermia in a baby shows as bright red, cold skin and very low energy. If you cannot keep the room warm, leave.
Over 65, even a mildly cool home at 60–65°F can trigger hypothermia. Guidance is to hold 68–70°F. Older people often do not feel cold, and diabetes and some common cold remedies blunt the response further. Watch for confusion, sleepiness, slurred speech, stiffness, a weak pulse. A reading of 96°F or lower means call 911.
64°F is the WHO minimum healthy indoor temperature for the general population. There is no honest single figure below which an adult becomes hypothermic — it depends on clothing, damp, air movement and time — so treat 64°F as a floor to defend, not a danger line.
Warm the chest, neck, head and groin first. Skin-to-skin under dry layers, warm sweet non-alcoholic drinks, never alcohol. If someone is unconscious with no apparent pulse, handle them gently, call for help and start CPR anyway — cold casualties have been revived from apparent death.

Cold does not raise your calorie needs. Shivering does.

The folk wisdom is wrong. Research on Arctic soldiers and polar expeditions found intake and body weight essentially unchanged by cold once people are properly clothed — what raises energy cost is work, not air temperature. Shivering is different: sustained shivering runs up to five times resting metabolism. But that is not a budget line, it is a failure signal. If your plan requires people to shiver for warmth, the plan has already failed. Keep the normal calorie figures on this page and fix the clothing.

Carbon monoxide & backfeed

More people have died of carbon monoxide after storms than in them. It is the failure mode that recurs in every long outage, hot or cold, and almost always because somebody reasoned their way past a rule. The most common wrong belief is that ventilation makes an unsafe appliance safe. It does not. There are two categories, and confusing them is what kills people.

Category A — never indoors, ventilation is irrelevant

Generators, charcoal in any form, camp stoves, grills, any petrol or diesel engine, and your kitchen range used as a heater. The federal wording is deliberately absolute: charcoal must never be used indoors “even if ventilation is provided,” and generators never in homes or garages “even if doors and windows are open.” Not the garage, not the carport, not a porch, not a shed, not a tent, not a car in an attached garage.

Generators run outside only, at least 20 feet from the house, exhaust pointed away from every door, window and vent, and out of rain and snow.
Charcoal keeps producing CO after the flames die. Smouldering coals brought inside have killed whole households.
One portable generator produces as much carbon monoxide as hundreds of cars, and poisoning can render someone unconscious before they recognise a symptom.

Category B — listed for indoor use, and still needs ventilation and an alarm

ODS-equipped propane radiant heaters and UL-listed kerosene heaters are permitted indoors. That permission comes with conditions people routinely drop:

Crack an outside window about an inch, or leave the door to the rest of the house open. Federal kerosene-heater guidance says this explicitly.
An ODS is an oxygen sensor, not a CO alarm. It shuts the heater off when oxygen near the burner drops. It does not detect incomplete combustion from wrong gas pressure, a fouled or dusty burner, or a flame disturbed by a draught — all of which produce CO with plenty of oxygen in the room. In testing, a CO alarm sounded hours before the ODS tripped.
“Indoor safe” on the box does not mean safe in a sealed room while you sleep. Unvented heaters should never be the primary heat source, and never run while the household is asleep.
Kerosene heaters take water-clear 1-K kerosene only, never petrol, and are refuelled outdoors with the heater off and cooled. Keep three feet from anything that burns.

The alarm itself

Battery or battery-backup, always. A hardwired-only alarm dies with the grid, which is precisely when you start burning things indoors.
One on every level and outside each sleeping area. Interconnected if you can.
Most consumer CO alarms are only rated to operate between 40°F and 100°F. A house that has dropped below 40°F in a winter outage is outside the alarm's specified range — exactly when the risk peaks. No official guidance addresses this, so the practical answer is to keep the alarm in the one heated room with you rather than on a cold wall, and to keep spare batteries warm.
Alarms are time-weighted and will not sound below about 30 ppm no matter how long it lasts. A slow leak from an unvented heater can poison you without ever tripping it.
A chirping alarm in a cold dark house is easily mistaken for a low battery and silenced. Five chirps a minute means end of life, not low battery.
If it sounds, get outside first and call 911 from there. Do not investigate.

Buying a generator

Look for ANSI/UL 2201 first — it requires both reduced CO emissions and automatic shutoff. ANSI/PGMA G300 is the weaker second choice, requiring shutoff alone; the current edition is G300:2023, mandatory for certification from January 2026. Sold under names like CO-MINDER, COsense and CO Shield.

CPSC modelling estimates those standards would prevent roughly 87% and 100% of generator CO deaths. Those are projections rather than observed outcomes, market compliance is still low, and both assume the generator is outdoors — certification is not licence to bring it closer. Around 85 people a year die from generator CO, and 81% of those deaths happen at home.

The other way a generator kills, and this one kills strangers

Carbon monoxide is the hazard everyone warns about. Backfeed is the one that gets left off preparedness lists, including this one until now. It is the reason the fix below is not optional.

Never plug a generator into a wall outlet

Running a cord from the generator into a socket to energise the house wiring — the double-male cord people call a suicide cord — pushes power backwards through your meter and out onto the utility line. The neighbourhood transformer steps it back up to several thousand volts. A lineman restoring your street expects a dead wire and can be killed by yours. It also bypasses every breaker in the house, so nothing protects the circuit from fire, and when grid power returns the collision can destroy the generator with you standing next to it.

Two safe options, and no third:

Extension cords, generator to appliance. Outdoor-rated, correctly sized, plugged into the generator's own outlets. This covers a refrigerator, lights, a fan or heater and chargers — which is most of what this page's power section assumes anyway.
A transfer switch or interlock kit fitted by a licensed electrician. This physically prevents the house being connected to the generator and the grid at the same time. It is the only way to run hardwired circuits, and the only way to do it legally in most of the US.

Worth doing before hurricane season rather than during one. An interlock kit is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin, and an electrician can usually fit one in a morning.

The plan

How the 90 days actually run, and when to stop staying put.

Core principles

Strategy is bug-in — stay home — unless the structure becomes unsafe or an evacuation order covers your zone. Survival priorities run fastest threat to slowest:

You can survive without…	Roughly	Priority
Air, or with an uncontrolled injury	Minutes	1
Shelter in extreme weather	Hours	2
Safe water	Days	3
Food	Weeks	4

The numbers behind this page

Water: 1 gallon per person per day for drinking and basic sanitation, flat across ages. Increase for heat, pregnancy, nursing, illness, or heavy physical work.
Calories: ~2,200 per adult, ~1,800 per senior, ~1,800 per school-age child, ~1,100 per toddler, per day.
Diapers: 5–6 changes a day. Stress raises usage, so budget high.
Pacing item: a toddler or a senior, not the household average. Dehydration and heat reach them first, so every decision gets made for them.

Purification, in order of preference

Let it settle, then filter it first. Pour cloudy water through a clean cloth, paper towel or coffee filter before doing anything else. Disinfection works poorly in cloudy water, and this step is the one people skip.
Boiling — a rolling boil for 1 minute, or 3 minutes if you are above 6,500 feet. Water boils at a lower temperature as you climb, so a one-minute boil stops being hot enough to do the job. Most of the country is well under that line; the places above it are the mountain West — Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Taos, Park City, Big Bear, most of the Colorado high country. If you do not know your elevation, boil for 3 minutes. The only thing it costs you is fuel, and the page has already budgeted that.
Filtration — removes bacteria and protozoa. Pair with boiling or chemical treatment where viral contamination is a concern.
Unscented bleach — the table below. Never scented, color-safe, or cleaner-added.

Bleach, per gallon of water

Bleach strength	Clear water	Cloudy, cold or colored
6% sodium hypochlorite	8 drops	16 drops
8.25% sodium hypochlorite	6 drops	12 drops

Stir and let stand 30 minutes. It should smell faintly of chlorine afterwards; if it doesn't, repeat the dose and wait another 15 minutes. Bleach loses strength on the shelf, so check the manufacture date and rotate it — an old jug will not deliver the dose above.

What treatment does not fix

Never mix bleach with ammonia or any other cleaner. Ventilate while you work.
Neither bleach nor iodine kills Cryptosporidium. Boiling or a filter rated for it is the only reliable answer.
Nothing here removes heavy metals, salts or most chemicals. That matters on any coast, where storm surge means saltwater intrusion.
Water with floating material, dark color or a questionable smell gets discarded, not treated.
Never drink water from radiators or boilers.

On iodine

CDC advises against iodine-disinfected water for anyone pregnant, anyone with a thyroid condition, and anyone with an iodine sensitivity, and says nobody should drink it for more than a few weeks. Given how many households that touches, and that boiling and bleach are both cheaper and more effective, iodine is a complication this plan doesn't need. Use boiling or filtration for a small child's water.

Draining the water heater, in order

Turn off the power or gas to the heater first. This is not optional — and never switch it back on while the tank is empty. An energized element in a dry tank burns out, and worse.
Shut the water intake valve.
Open a hot-water faucet, and the highest faucet in the house, to let air in.
Drain from the bottom tap. The water is 120°F or hotter — wear gloves and eye protection, or let it cool first.
The first gallons carry tank sediment, which can harbor bacteria. Filter them through cloth, then disinfect as above. A tank is a reserve, not a sterile one.

A tankless heater holds nothing. Find and label your main incoming water valve now, so you can close it the moment broken mains or sewage lines are reported — that is what preserves whatever is in the tank and pipes.

South Florida adjustments

A generic plan assumes a temperate climate. Miami changes several assumptions in ways that matter.

Factor	Why it changes the plan
Hurricane is the likely scenario	Season runs June 1 to November 30. Unlike most disasters you get 3–5 days of warning, so the plan needs a pre-storm checklist: fuel vehicles, fill bathtubs, charge everything, secure outdoor items, get cash.
No basements	Homes sit on slab with a high water table. There is no below-grade refuge. Your safe room is an interior room on the lowest floor, away from windows — a bathroom or closet with no exterior walls.
Heat, not cold	A powerless home in August can pass 95°F indoors. A toddler overheats far faster than an adult, and heat tolerance drops with age and with many common medications. Cooling is a survival item here.
Storm surge is the top killer	Miami-Dade uses five surge planning zones, A through E. Zone A is at risk from Category 1; Zone E only from Category 5. These cover surge only, not your flood zone.
Rain flooding without surge	Miami floods from heavy rain alone. Keep supplies 12–18 inches off the floor on shelving or pallets.
Mosquito-borne illness	Standing water after a storm means mosquitoes. Child-safe repellent, screens or netting, and a routine of dumping standing water around the property.
Long outages	Post-hurricane restoration has taken days to weeks. Plan energy around “no grid for 2–3 weeks” as the baseline, not the extreme case.

Rain barrels are washing water, not drinking water

Rooftop runoff picks up two different hazards. Bird droppings and roof debris are the microbial half, and a first-flush diverter plus filtering and boiling handles those. The other half is chemical — asbestos, lead and copper leaching from shingles, flashing, solder and gutters — and no amount of boiling or bleach removes any of it. Plan catchment as flushing, washing and cleaning water, which frees your stored potable water for drinking. Treat it as a drinking source only as a last resort, and only off a metal or barrel-tile roof. Many states have no regulation covering residential cisterns at all, so nobody may be inspecting your setup but you.

Screen every barrel or empty it at least every ten days. Miami-Dade has year-round Aedes aegypti, and an open barrel after a storm breeds the mosquito that carries dengue.

Evacuate regardless of zone

Mobile home and trailer residents should leave whenever any hurricane evacuation order is issued, whatever their surge zone. The same applies to anyone dependent on electrically powered life-sustaining medical equipment.

The three phases

Phase 1 · Days 1–7 · Stabilize

Get everyone safe and accounted for, and into a basic routine. Keep a small child's schedule as normal as possible.

Safety & shelter	Confirm the home is structurally sound. Shut off damaged utilities. Create a toddler-proofed indoor space — blocked outlets, secured furniture, soft flooring.
Water	Use stored water first. Fill bathtubs, sinks, and clean containers immediately if municipal water still runs. Never ration a toddler's water.
Food	Refrigerator first (~4 hours without power), then freezer (~48 hours full and unopened, ~24 half-full), then shelf-stable. Soft, familiar foods for the little ones; no choking hazards.
Hygiene	Strict handwashing. Change diapers promptly, store sealed and away from living areas. Set up the bucket or portable toilet system.
Medical	Daily health checks, especially hydration, fever, and injuries. Isolate anyone sick where space allows.
Communication	NOAA radio on. Confirm meeting points and an out-of-area contact. Limit scary news exposure around small children.

Phase 2 · Days 8–30 · Establish systems

Shift from stored supplies toward renewable, repeatable systems.

Water	Start rain collection. Rotate purification methods. Track daily usage against your target.
Food	Ration deliberately. One-pot meals to save fuel. Start garden seeds or sprouts. Watch small children for weight loss or low energy.
Sanitation	Improve waste management — compost if safe, or bury far from water sources. Daily wipe-down of surfaces small children touch. Diarrhea prevention is the priority.
Energy	Insulate and block drafts; in heat, maximize cross-ventilation and shade instead. Solar for lights and radio.
Security	Reinforce doors quietly. Don't advertise supplies. Rotate a night watch among adults.
Children	Hold the sleep and nap schedule strictly. Simple play and storytelling. Expect behavioral regression under stress.

Phase 3 · Days 31–90 · Sustain & adapt

Systems that can run indefinitely until normal services return.

Water	Reliable multi-source system: storage plus collection plus purification. Small children's drinking water still outranks every other use.
Food	Maximize production — container gardens; foraging or trapping only with verified skill and where legal. Diversify grains, legumes, vegetables, fats, proteins. Barter cautiously.
Hygiene	Switch to cloth or hybrid diapering if water supports thorough washing and drying. Composting or advanced waste system.
Medical	Home remedies supplement, never replace. Wound care and infection prevention. Keep an evacuation route ready for anything serious.
Family health	A structured daily schedule is now critical, not optional. Manage adult stress deliberately — it transmits straight to the children. Small achievable goals.
Adaptation	Review weekly. Adjust for weather, remaining supplies, and everyone's health.

Daily routine

Adjust times to your conditions. The structure matters more than the clock.

Time block	Activities
Morning	Hydration check for everyone, breakfast, hygiene, light work or play.
Midday	Main meal, nap or quiet time, adult tasks — water collection, food prep, security checks.
Afternoon	Outdoor time if safe, skills practice, snacks.
Evening	Dinner, family time and stories, cleanup, night security setup.
All day	Handwashing before eating and after toilet use, monitoring the little ones, tracking water use.

Toddler risk & response

These five account for most of the serious risk to a small child in a prolonged emergency. Check them daily, every phase.

Risk	Watch for	Response
Dehydration	Dry mouth, no tears when crying, fewer wet diapers, sunken soft spot, lethargy	Never ration their water. Oral rehydration solution at the first sign. Seek help if it worsens.
Diarrhea & illness	Loose stools, fever, vomiting	Strict handwashing and water purification. Isolate where possible. ORS immediately. Treat as urgent, not routine.
Temperature extremes	Flushed or pale skin, heavy sweating or shivering, unusual sleepiness	Layer or strip clothing, monitor indoor temperature, never leave a child in an unventilated space.
Choking	Prevention, not detection	The full AAP list, under age four: hot dogs; hard, gooey or sticky candy; chewing gum; nuts and seeds; whole grapes; raw vegetables such as carrot sticks; raw fruit chunks; popcorn; thick chunks of peanut butter; marshmallows; meat sticks and sausages; chunks of meat; cheese chunks and string cheese. Cut everything to half an inch or smaller, chop round firm foods completely rather than halving them, spread nut butter thin, and keep the child seated.
Emotional distress	Regression in potty training or sleep, clinginess, tantrums, withdrawal	Hold the routine. Comfort item always available. Limit exposure to adult stress. Extra patience, not discipline.

Security

A long grid-down stretch looks much the same whatever caused it — hurricane, ice storm, wildfire, a cyber incident on the grid or the payment system, a supply failure, civil disorder. Security planning is where people tend to start at the dramatic end and skip the things that actually work. The order below is deliberate: it runs from what reduces risk most to what reduces it least.

What actually keeps a household safe, in order

Not being there. Leaving early beats every other measure combined. The evacuation triggers below are the most valuable security content on this page.
Not looking worth the trouble. Lit, occupied, hardened homes get skipped. Generators running in open view and visible supplies do the opposite.
Physical hardening. Cheap, passive, works while you sleep, and carries no chance of a tragic mistake.
Neighbors. Four households watching one street is worth more than any single household's equipment.
Defensive tools. Real, and last on the list because they only matter once the first four have failed.

One thing this page will not do is give tactical guidance for confronting people. Planning around armed confrontation is both the least likely branch and the one with the worst outcomes when it goes wrong, including for you legally. Deterrence, distance and leaving are the plan; a defensive tool is the fallback when those are gone.

Hardening — do this first

Item	What to get	Why it works
Door reinforcement	3-inch screws + strike plate kit, each exterior door	Most forced entries break the jamb, not the lock. Swapping the short screws in your strike plate for 3-inch ones that reach the stud is the single highest-value security spend in this whole document, at about $15 a door.
Security film	Exterior glass doors, ground-floor windows	Holds glass together when struck. Doubles as storm protection, so it earns its place twice.
Door bars / sliders	1 per sliding door	Sliding glass doors are a standard weak point in warm-climate housing.
Motion lighting	Solar, 2–4 units	Solar keeps working when the grid doesn't. Light is deterrence that needs no one awake.
Door/window alarms	Battery, one per entry	$3 each. Noise at the perimeter buys you the seconds that matter and wakes the house.
Interior safe room	Pick it now	The same windowless interior room you'd use for the storm. Solid-core door, a lock, a charged phone and a light stored inside it.
Window coverings	Blackout curtains	If nobody can see your lights, your supplies or your routine, you are not a target that was chosen.

Less-lethal

Item	Quantity	Notes
Pepper spray (OC)	1 per adult + 2 spare	Rules vary by state — Florida, for instance, permits self-defense chemical spray up to 2 oz without a licence. Check yours before buying. Buy gel rather than fogger for indoor use — it carries less blowback in a confined space or wind. It expires: check the date and replace every 2–3 years.
Inert practice canister	1	Spray you have never used is spray you will fumble. Practice outdoors with the inert one.
Personal alarm	1 per person	130 dB, pull-pin. Works for a child or an older relative who should not be handling anything else.
Heavy flashlight	1 per adult	Already on your supply list. A bright light in the eyes ends more encounters than most people expect.

Firearms

Lawful firearm ownership is a legitimate part of household preparedness and plenty of families already have one. If that is you, the storage question comes before every other consideration on this page, because the risk that actually materializes in a home with a small child is not an intruder.

Storage, with a toddler in the house

Most states have a child-access prevention law, and they differ sharply in what they require and whom they count as a minor. Florida's (§790.174) sits at the weaker end: a locked box, a trigger lock, or somewhere a reasonable person would believe secure, with a minor defined as under 16. Look up your own state's. Treat that as the legal floor, not the standard. A two-year-old cannot read a rule and is strong enough to pull a trigger. Locked, unloaded, with ammunition stored separately, and a quick-access safe if you want it available — those are not competing goals, and modern biometric or simplex safes resolve them in under two seconds.

An emergency makes this harder, not easier: routines break, things get moved, the house fills with stress and other people. The discipline has to be decided now, while nothing is happening.

If you are starting from zero

Training before hardware. A firearm you have not trained with is a liability to the people in your own house. Take a defensive course that covers the legal side as well as the mechanical one, and shoot regularly enough to stay competent.
Know the law before you need it. Self-defense law is fact-specific, consequential, and varies enormously between states — what is lawful in one may be a felony across a state line. Verify current requirements for purchase, storage, transport and carry against your own state's statute or an attorney licensed there — not against a preparedness page, including this one. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
Ammunition. Plan around what training consumes rather than around a siege: a few hundred rounds per firearm covers regular practice plus a defensive supply. Store it cool, dry and in original packaging — Humidity degrades ammunition far faster than age does, and a hot garage is the worst place in the house for it. Locked, and separate from the firearm.
Everyone in the house gets the safety rules, including children old enough to understand them, framed as "don't touch, tell an adult" rather than as a secret.

Staying off the radar

Run the generator where it can't be seen, and accept that it can always be heard. Noise is the main thing that advertises a prepared house. Run it in bursts rather than continuously — which your fuel budget already requires.
Don't post about your supplies, before or during. That includes the friendly version where you offer to help — it tells everyone reading where the food is.
Bring supplies in discreetly and break down the packaging inside. A kerbside pile of generator and water-drum boxes is an advertisement.
Cook outdoors upwind where you can. Cooking smells travel a long way in a neighborhood with nothing else going on.
Agree what you will say if someone asks what you have. "We're managing, same as everyone" is a complete answer and it needs to be the same answer from every adult in the house.

Cyber and identity resilience

A cyber incident on a payment network, a utility or a bank looks different from a storm: the lights may stay on while money, records and communications stop working. Most of the preparation is just making sure nothing critical exists only in one place.

Cash is the whole answer for payments. Your cash reserve line already covers it, and this is the scenario that most justifies it.
Paper copies of what matters: IDs, insurance policies and policy numbers, deeds and titles, medical records, prescription list, account numbers, and a written list of emergency contacts. In the fire- and water-resistant document case, where a dead phone and a dead network can't reach them.
An offline copy of your password vault, encrypted, on a USB drive. If you cannot log into anything, you cannot prove who you are.
Printed account and policy numbers are what let you start an insurance claim when the portal is down and the call centre is swamped.
Enable multi-factor authentication now, and keep recovery codes on paper. Identity theft spikes after disasters, when everyone is distracted and filing claims.
Expect scams. Fake FEMA agents, fake contractors demanding cash upfront, fake charity appeals. Verify independently before paying anyone, and never pay a disaster contractor in full up front.

Neighbors

This is the measure with the best return and the lowest cost, and it is the one most preparedness content skips. Four households who know each other can run a watch rotation, share a generator, pool a chainsaw, and notice when someone's elderly parent hasn't been seen in a day. Work out before the season who on your street has medical needs, who has useful skills or equipment, and who lives alone. You do not have to disclose your own supplies to do any of that.

Evacuation triggers

Bug-in is the default. Leave immediately if any of these is true:

The home becomes structurally unsafe — fire, flooding, major damage, or a gas leak you can't shut off.
Water or food can't be secured or purified within 24–48 hours and no resupply is realistically coming.
Someone needs medical care beyond what you can provide and transport is still possible.
Refrigerated medication is close to spoiling, or powered medical equipment is close to losing its last charge. Leave while that is still a decision rather than an emergency.
Local authorities issue a mandatory evacuation order for your zone.
The area becomes unsafe from external threats — civil unrest, wildfire, approaching severe weather.

Keep ready at all times

A 72-hour go-bag per person, a full tank of gas or charged vehicle, and a predetermined rally point if the family gets separated.

Reference

Specs, buying order, local contacts, and the terms used above.

Equipment specs

What to look for when buying the items your supply list calls for.

Equipment	Spec to look for	Why
Portable generator	3,000–4,500W	Covers a fridge, fans, charging and one window AC with margin. 7,500W is about five times the load most families list, and a lightly loaded generator wastes fuel and wet-stacks. Inverter type if budget allows. ANSI/UL 2201 CO shut-off first choice, ANSI/PGMA G300:2023 second.
Battery power station	1,000–2,000Wh, LiFePO4	Fans, phones, lights, CPAP. Not air conditioning. LiFePO4 gives ~3,000 cycles against ~500 for NMC and tolerates 113°F against 104°F, which matters in any uncooled garage — though it should live in the conditioned house anyway.
Solar panel	200–400W	Rated watts are not delivered watts: a 100W panel measures 75–80W in full sun, 10–30W under cloud, and returns 200–300Wh on a typical sunny day. 400W is what refills a station between nights.
CO detector	Battery or battery-backup	A plug-in unit is useless during the outage you'd be running a generator through. Interconnected is better.
Window AC	5,000–8,000 BTU	450W running at 5,000 BTU, 660–800W at 8,000, surging 2,000–4,000W on start. Generator only. If you can cool one room, cool the one where the baby or senior sleeps.
Cooler	50–70 qt rotomolded	Holds ice 4–7 days, which dramatically extends your refrigerated food window.
Hurricane shutters	5/8” exterior-grade	Pre-cut and labeled per window in the off-season. Cutting plywood the day before a storm is how people get hurt.
Water filters	Check rated gallons	Capacity ranges from 1,000 to 100,000+ gallons depending on model. Read the spec, not the marketing.
Bathtub bladder	65–100 gal	Turns the tub into clean storage instead of questionable standing water.
Weather radio	NOAA, crank + battery + solar	Evacuation orders go out by zone over the air.
Two-way radios	FRS/GMRS	Cell networks fail. Useful if adults separate.
Chainsaw or bow saw	—	Downed trees block driveways and crews take days.
Sump or utility pump	Plus a wet vac	Rain flooding, not just surge.

Supplements & dried food

A 90-day stored-food diet runs heavy on grains and cans and light on fresh produce, which leaves predictable gaps. Run specific products and doses past your pediatrician and your own doctor before stocking — especially anything for a small child, where dosing is weight-based.

Supplement	Why it's on the list
Adult multivitamin	Baseline coverage for what a canned-goods diet misses.
Children's multivitamin	Liquid or chewable. Liquid is easier if a toddler won't chew.
Vitamin C	Fresh fruit and vegetables disappear first in a long event.
Vitamin D	Hard to get from stored food, and relevant if you're indoors for weeks.
Electrolyte powder	Sustained heat costs more than plain water replaces.
Pediatric ORS	The single most important item here. Rehydration salts work by sodium-glucose cotransport, which keeps working during heavy diarrhea and drags water across with it — that needs roughly equal glucose and sodium. A sports drink runs about ten parts sugar to one part sodium: far too little sodium to drive the transport, and enough excess sugar to pull more water into the gut and worsen the diarrhea. For a dehydrated small child it is not a substitute, it is a step backwards.
Iron	A common gap without fresh meat — but only on pediatrician guidance. Excess iron is genuinely dangerous for small children.
Fiber supplement	A stored-food diet constipates, children included.
Shelf-stable probiotic	Gut health under a disrupted diet.

Most supplements run 2–3 years, shorter than your dry food. Rotate annually.

Dried & freeze-dried

More expensive per calorie than rice and beans, but it earns a place: 25–30 year shelf life, minimal fuel, and portability if you end up evacuating.

Type	Role	Notes
Freeze-dried bucket meals	2–4 weeks behind your staples	Check water needed per serving — some need more than you'll want to spare.
Freeze-dried fruit & veg	Fills the biggest nutritional gap	Children often accept these better than canned; they dissolve easily.
Dehydrated milk & egg powder	Baking, cooking, nutrition	—
Instant oatmeal packets	Breakfast, minimal fuel	Familiar texture matters more than you'd think with a stressed child.
Powdered peanut butter	Protein, long shelf life, light	Confirm no allergy.
Instant rice & beans	Cuts cooking fuel sharply	Worth a portion of your supply even at higher cost.
Jerky & meat sticks	No-cook protein, go-bag friendly	High sodium — pair with extra water.
Shelf-stable toddler pouches	Familiar, no prep, no choking risk	12–18 month shelf life, so rotate into normal use and replace.

Three things this diet gets wrong on its own

Vitamin C is the serious one. Canned and dried staples carry almost none. Without supplements this plan runs near 2 mg per person per day against roughly 10 mg to prevent scurvy, and connective-tissue signs show up after a few months — inside the window you are planning for. Ascorbic acid tablets are cheap and tiny. Buy them.
Powdered milk must say fortified with vitamins A and D. The unfortified product takes the plan from 88% of the vitamin A requirement to 18%, and vitamin D to zero. Almost all the plan's calcium rides on this one line as well, so shrinking it collapses calcium to about 15%.
Iron looks fine on paper and is marginal in practice. It depends on your rice and pasta being enriched — unenriched rice has about a thirtieth of the iron. It is also all non-heme iron, poorly absorbed, made worse by the phytates in a grain-and-bean diet and by the missing vitamin C. Fixing the vitamin C fixes some of the iron too.

Keep iron supplements locked away from children

Iron was the leading cause of death by medicine in children under six through the 1980s, and in most fatal cases the bottle had a child-resistant cap. The tablets look like candy. Around 300 mg of elemental iron can make a toddler seriously ill — well inside one bottle of adult multivitamins. Poisoning runs in two phases with a deceptive quiet period in between where the child seems to recover, which is how caregivers get caught out. Store anything iron-containing, adult multivitamins included, physically separated and locked. If you suspect a child has swallowed any, call Poison Control on 1-800-222-1222 immediately — do not wait for symptoms.

The water cost

Freeze-dried and dehydrated foods trade shelf life for water at preparation time. If water is your constraint, canned goods — which come packed in liquid — are the better choice. Don't build a 90-day plan entirely on freeze-dried unless your water system is solid.

What this costs

Rough US retail, scaled to your household and horizon. These are planning ranges to budget against, not quotes — check current prices, and expect to build this over six to twelve months rather than in one purchase.

Category	Estimate	What drives it

Where the money actually goes

Food is the largest line and bulk staples are not what makes it expensive — rice, oats, pasta and beans together run well under $300 for a family of four for 90 days. Canned protein, canned fruit and powdered milk are roughly two-thirds of the food bill. If the budget is tight, shift the ratio toward staples and accept a plainer diet.

Cash is the line people underestimate

It is a reserve you hold, not a cost you incur. The figure is sized to the evacuation case, because that is the expensive one: five nights of lodging at hurricane-season rates, two tanks of fuel and food on the road clears $1,300 for a family of four before anything goes wrong. Sheltering in place costs less — generator fuel, ice, an emergency tarp — but you don't get to know in advance which one you're facing.

Your local resources

Everything else on this page is arithmetic that works anywhere. This part does not — evacuation zones, shelters, registries and alerts are run county by county, and the numbers that matter are the ones for where you actually live. Look these up before a season, not during one, and write the answers down somewhere that works with a dead phone.

Why 90 days is not paranoid

Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico, 2017. Parts of the island were dark for more than six months. At 3.4 billion customer-hours it is the largest blackout in US history, roughly three times the next biggest.
The January 1998 ice storm. Up to three inches of ice across northern New England and New York; some outages ran several weeks. The deaths were largely carbon monoxide, from stoves and generators people used to get warm.
Texas, February 2021. Only a week, and still 246 dead — 64% of hypothermia, indoors.

Three to fourteen days is the official floor. These are the events that set the ceiling.

Find these once, write them down

Your evacuation zone. Most coastal and flood-prone counties assign one by address. Orders are announced by zone on the radio, so a zone you don’t know is an announcement you can’t act on.
Your county emergency management office — the authority that actually opens shelters and issues orders where you live.
Which nearby shelters take pets, and what they require. Pre-registration, proof of residency and current rabies records are typical, and registering rarely guarantees a space.
Your special-needs or medical registry. Most counties keep one for people who need transport assistance or depend on powered medical equipment. It is voluntary and you must sign up in advance.
Where you would actually go — ideally a friend or relative outside your hazard zone who has agreed in advance. A shelter is the fallback, not the plan.
A cooling or warming center near you, which is the one most people skip. For a household with an infant, an elderly member, or anyone on medication affecting temperature tolerance, this is a safety item rather than a comfort one.

Start with your county's actual hazard profile

FEMA's National Risk Index scores every US county and census tract against eighteen hazards — among them cold wave, ice storm, winter weather, heat wave, hurricane, wildfire, earthquake, tornado and riverine flooding. It is more useful than any regional rule of thumb, because it tells you which failures are actually likely where you live rather than which ones make the news. Note that it separates cold wave, ice storm and winter weather, and they break different things: cold waves threaten heating and pipes, ice storms cause the multi-week outages, winter weather cuts off resupply.

National starting points

ready.govFederal preparedness guidance, and the directory that points to your state and county emergency management.
2-1-1Free nationwide line for local disaster assistance, shelters, food and utility help. Works in most of the US.
weather.govNational Weather Service warnings for your exact location, including heat, cold, flood and winter storm alerts.
9-1-1Life-threatening only; expect long delays during an active event.
RadioA NOAA weather radio reaches you when the cell network and internet do not. This is why one is on your supply list.

A worked example: Miami-Dade

To show what “look up your local equivalent” means in practice, here is one county filled in. Yours will have the same shapes under different names.

Zone lookupStorm Surge Planning Zones — five zones, A to E, assigned by address. Zone A is at risk from a Category 1; Zone E only from a Category 5. These cover surge only, not your flood zone.
3-1-1The county answer line: zone lookups, shelter openings, pet-shelter applications and the evacuation-assistance registry, all through one number.
800-342-3557Florida State Emergency Information Hotline.
Mobile homesResidents of mobile homes and trailers evacuate on any order, whatever their zone — as does anyone on electrically powered life-sustaining equipment.

If you do end up at a shelter

Shelters provide basic food, but it takes time to set up — eat before you leave. Bring your own special-diet and infant food, fully charged devices and battery packs (outlets are scarce), bedding, medications and your document folder. Firearms are prohibited. Do not arrive before centers are announced as open.

Glossary

Term	Meaning
Bug-in	Sheltering at home through the crisis, as opposed to evacuating.
Bug-out / evacuation	Leaving the home for a safer location.
CDC	Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — source for the purification ratios and health guidance used here.
CO	Carbon monoxide. Colorless, odorless gas from generators, grills, and engines. A leading cause of post-storm deaths.
FEMA	Federal Emergency Management Agency — source for the water and food planning standards used here.
Food-grade container	Certified safe for long-term food or water storage, with no chemical leaching.
Freeze-dried	Food preserved by removing water under vacuum. 25–30 year shelf life; needs water to reconstitute.
Go-bag	A pre-packed bag per person with roughly 72 hours of supplies, ready for immediate evacuation.
Gray man approach	Avoiding anything that visibly signals you have supplies, to reduce the risk of theft or conflict.
MRE	Meal, Ready-to-Eat. A sealed military-style ration of about 1,300 calories needing no water, fuel or utensils. Shelf life is a storage-temperature claim, not a property of the food.
Julian pack date	The four-digit code on an MRE case giving the year and day it was packed. It is not an expiry date, and surplus sellers sometimes pass an inspection date off as one.
USCG bar	Coast Guard-approved lifeboat ration, typically 3,600 calories a pack. Dense, no prep, and rated to 300°F, which makes it the only food worth keeping in a car.
Serving (as sold)	A marketing unit, not a meal. Emergency food servings commonly run 137 to 214 calories, which is how a kit labelled three months can hold far less than three months of food.
ODS	Oxygen Depletion Sensor, fitted to indoor-rated propane heaters. It shuts the heater off when oxygen near the burner falls — it is not a carbon monoxide detector and will not catch a fouled burner or wrong gas pressure.
Comfort / Limit / Extreme	The three ISO sleeping bag ratings. Comfort is where an average woman sleeps comfortably, Limit where an average man gets through the night curled up, Extreme a survival-only figure that assumes hypothermia risk. Buy on Comfort.
Cord	A stacked 128 cubic feet of firewood, usually 4 ft by 4 ft by 8 ft. A "face cord" is a third to a half of that and is a common buying trap.
1-K kerosene	The water-clear low-sulphur grade required for indoor kerosene heaters. Never substitute petrol or a dyed grade.
National Risk Index	FEMA's county-level scoring of eighteen natural hazards, the authoritative way to find out what your own area actually faces.
Black swan	A rare, high-impact event nobody planned for specifically. For a household the practical upshot is that you prepare for consequences — no power, no water, no payments — rather than for causes.
MFA recovery codes	One-time backup codes that get you into an account when your phone or authenticator app is gone. Only useful if printed before you need them.
OC / pepper gel	Oleoresin capsicum, the active compound in pepper spray. Gel throws less blowback than a fogger indoors or in wind. Limits vary by state; Florida allows up to 2 oz without a licence.
Strike plate	The metal plate on the door frame that the bolt latches into. Factory ones use short screws biting only the trim; 3-inch screws reach the stud, and it is the cheapest meaningful security upgrade in a house.
HEC / Evacuation center	Hurricane Evacuation Center — a public shelter, usually a designated public school, opened only when an evacuation is ordered.
Inverter generator	Produces cleaner, more stable power than a conventional generator; quieter and safer for electronics.
NOAA	National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — operates the weather radio network and the surge model behind the zones.
ORS	Oral Rehydration Solution or Salts. Water, salts, and sugar in a measured mix, used to treat dehydration from diarrhea. Critical for small children.
PGMA G300 / UL 2201	Safety certification standards for portable generators that include automatic carbon monoxide shut-off. Look for one when buying.
Potable water	Water that is safe to drink.
Rolling boil	Water at a vigorous, continuous boil, not just simmering. Required for purification by heat.
Rule of 3s	The survival-priority framework: minutes without air, hours without shelter, days without water, weeks without food.
Shelf-stable	Safely stored at room temperature without refrigeration — canned, dried, or otherwise preserved.
SLOSH	Sea, Lake and Overland Surge from Hurricanes — the NOAA model Miami-Dade uses to draw its surge planning zones.
Storm surge planning zone	Miami-Dade's A–E zones indicating surge risk by hurricane category. Separate from your FEMA flood zone.
LiFePO4 vs NMC	Two lithium battery chemistries. LiFePO4 lasts around 3,000 charge cycles and tolerates 113°F; NMC manages about 500 cycles and 104°F. In a hot climate, buy LiFePO4.
Wh (watt-hour)	Capacity measure for battery power stations. Allowing for inverter losses, a 1,000Wh unit delivers about 850Wh and runs a 20-inch box fan roughly 10 hours, a pedestal fan 20, or a USB clip fan for weeks.
Heat index	What the temperature feels like once humidity is counted, and the number that predicts heat illness. Above about 99°F a fan increases heat stress instead of relieving it.
Surge watts	The brief spike a motor draws on startup, often 3–5× its running draw. It is what decides whether a generator or battery can start an appliance at all, separately from whether it can run it.