What actually goes in a 72-hour kit

JULY 2, 2026 · BY PAT

Our power goes out a couple times a year. Summer is a line of thunderstorms taking a tree into the lines; winter is ice. Usually it's back on in a few hours. A 72-hour kit is for the time it isn't, and three days is the standard target because that's roughly how long it can take for roads to clear and utility crews to catch up after a bad one. If you're reading this from the Gulf or the Atlantic coast, it's also the number FEMA keeps repeating every hurricane season, which is running right now.

The kit isn't a lifestyle. It's a box (in our case two totes and a duffel) that turns three bad days into three boring ones. Here's what's in ours, and the reasoning.

Water first

One gallon per person, per day. For a household of four, that's 12 gallons to cover 72 hours. Half of it is for drinking, the rest for cooking and washing. Store-bought cases work, and so do refilled jugs if you rotate them. If you have pets, count them too: our dog drinks more in a July outage than I do.

Food you don't have to cook

Plan around 2,000 calories per person, per day, and pick food that's ready straight from the package: peanut butter, crackers, canned stew, canned beans, tuna, dried fruit, granola. Two rules keep it honest. First, a manual can opener lives in the kit, not in the kitchen drawer. Second, only store what you already eat, because everything in the kit eventually gets eaten during rotation, and choking down a five-year-old ration bar you never liked is a self-inflicted wound.

Light, power, and news

A headlamp per person beats a shared flashlight; you'll want both hands. Spare batteries stay in the original packaging so they don't drain against each other in a bag. Add two charged power banks for phones and a battery or hand-crank NOAA weather radio, because when the cell network gets flaky the weather radio keeps working. We check the power banks when the clocks change; they self-discharge slowly, but they do self-discharge.

The winter problem

In Wisconsin the dangerous outage is the January one. Cold-weather sleeping bags, wool blankets, hats, and a plan to close the household into one room will get you through three days without heat. What will not get you through them is a generator, camp stove, or charcoal grill running indoors. Carbon monoxide kills people in every long outage, usually in the first 48 hours. Generators run outside, at least 20 feet from windows. If you have gas heat or a generator anywhere near the house, a battery CO detector belongs in the kit.

The boring stuff that matters

• Medications. Three days of prescriptions, plus a basic first aid kit you've actually opened once.
• Documents. Copies of IDs, insurance cards, and the house policy in a zip bag, or on a USB stick.
• Cash. Small bills. Card readers die with the power.
• Sanitation. Toilet paper, wipes, garbage bags, and a bucket if you're on a well pump that quits with the grid.
• Pets. Three days of their food, and a leash that lives with the kit.

Keep it where you can grab it

Ours lives on one shelf by the basement stairs, in containers we can carry to the car in two trips. That matters more on the coasts: a hurricane kit that can't leave the house with you is only half a kit. Inland, the grab-and-go case is rarer, but a chimney fire or a gas leak doesn't schedule an appointment either.

The kit you built three years ago

The real failure mode isn't a missing item, it's the kit that was perfect in 2023: dead batteries, expired ibuprofen, canned stew two years past its date, a phone cable for a phone you no longer own. A 72-hour kit is not a project you finish, it's a small inventory you rotate. Check it twice a year. We do it when the clocks change, same as the smoke detectors.

That's the part BeaglePrep exists for. Give the kit its own location in the app, set your household size, and the Prep Score shows your days of supply per category, so you can see you're covered for water but two days short on food. Expiration reminders flag the stew and the ibuprofen before they age out instead of after. Get BeaglePrep free on Android and give your kit the twice-a-year check it needs.