Duration Decides Everything
By Scenario
Seventy-two hours, two weeks, thirty days — and why an ice storm, a hurricane and a wildfire need three different plans.
Preparedness advice usually arrives as a shopping list, which is why so much of it gets bought and then never used. A better organizing question is: how long, and do I stay or go? Duration determines quantities. Stay-or-go determines whether the answer is a basement full of supplies or a car that leaves in twenty minutes. Almost every disagreement about what to buy dissolves once those two things are fixed.
Three durations, three different plans
| 72 hours | Two weeks | Thirty days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Water | 15-20 gal stored | 70-100 gal or a way to pump | Renewable source plus filtration |
| Power | Battery station, 1-2 kWh | Generator plus fuel rotation | Standby unit or heavily reduced loads |
| Heat | Blankets and one small heater | Indoor-rated heater plus tanks | Wood or vented fuel appliance |
| Food | Refrigerator and pantry | Shelf-stable, no cooking required | Bulk staples and a way to cook them |
| Sanitation | Gray water flushing | Bucket system, cover material | Composting toilet or a disposal plan |
| Rough spend | $300-$800 | $1,500-$4,000 | $5,000+ |
The steepest jump is between 72 hours and two weeks, because that is where consumables stop being enough and infrastructure starts being necessary. Most households get real value from covering two weeks well and very little from covering thirty days badly. Figures are rough and at the time of writing; size yours from the load audit in Start Here.
The scenarios that behave differently
- Winter storm and ice. Long duration, slow onset, and the plumbing is the thing that costs you money. Ice takes down lines over a wide area and repair crews work slowly, so multi-day outages are normal. Heat comes before everything — see Heat & Cold.
- Hurricane. Days of warning, then wind, water and a long outage in heat and humidity. Fuel and cash run out before landfall, not after. Cooling, mosquitoes and water contamination dominate; flooding can put a septic drain field out of service — see Sanitation.
- Wildfire. The only scenario on this list where staying is usually the wrong answer. Minutes of warning, evacuation orders, and a go-bag plus documents matter far more than a well-stocked basement. Defensible space around the structure is the preparation that works.
- Flooding. Fast, local and dirty. Water contamination, sewage backup and the loss of anything stored low in the house. Store supplies above expected flood level and know your route out before the road is cut.
- Extended grid failure. Rare, slow, and mostly a longer version of the two-week plan with resupply removed — covered in EMP & Grid Down.
Stay or go, decided in advance
Write down the conditions that would make you leave — an evacuation order, a house that cannot be kept above freezing, an injury needing care, water you cannot make safe — and agree them with everyone in the household while nobody is stressed. The value of deciding in advance is that it removes the argument at the worst possible moment, and it tells you which supplies need to be portable.
Keep the go-bag small and the documents digital and duplicated: insurance policies, deeds, prescriptions, photos of the house and its contents, and a printed contact list on paper for when phones are dead. Two full tanks of fuel in the driveway is a cheap habit that has saved a lot of people a long wait.
Rehearse the boring parts
A plan that has never been run is a hypothesis. Turn off the main breaker on a Saturday and live on the backup for six hours: you will discover which cords are too short, that the router needs its own power, and that the camp stove has no fuel canister. The list of things that go wrong in a rehearsal is almost never the list you expected.
From here, size the individual systems in Power & Backup, Water and Food Storage, map your specific building in The House, and check the medical side in Health & Safety.