Most American households lose power every year and evacuate maybe once a decade. Build for the frequent event first, then add the rare one on top of it.
Which event is your household actually going to face?
Look at your own county’s last ten years rather than at the news. The answer is almost always an outage, and occasionally a storm that moves you.
This sounds obvious and it is routinely ignored. People build a go bag because a go bag is a satisfying object, then lose power for thirty hours with two days of water in the house and no way to run the refrigerator. The bag was never wrong. It was answering a question the household had not been asked yet.
- Count the outages your street had in ten years. That number sets the size of the stay put bin.
- Count the times anyone on your street left. For most of the country it is zero or one.
- Check which of the two you have actually spent money on. The answer is usually the rarer one.
The frequency argument is the whole of it. If the common event is an outage, then the first fifty dollars and the first weekend go into staying put comfortably, and the bag comes after.
What changes between a bag and a bin?
Weight and duplication. A bin can hold what a household needs. A bag can only hold what a person can carry away from the house.
| Stay put bin | Go bag | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Two weeks at home with no power or water | Seventy two hours away from the house |
| Weight limit | None, it never moves | Whatever the smallest adult can carry to the car |
| Water | Stored volume, jugs, plus treatment | Two litres per person, plus treatment |
| Food | Ordinary groceries, cooked normally | No cook, no water needed, three days |
| Light | Lantern plus headlamps | Headlamp only |
| Documents | Originals in a fire box | Copies, and a scan you can reach |
| Tools | Full kit, including the good knife | One folder or small fixed blade, multitool |
| Cost to build | Low, most of it is groceries | Higher per item, everything is duplicated |
| How often it gets used | Every outage, several times a year | Rarely, possibly never |
How long do you really have to leave?
Plan for twenty minutes. Hurricane evacuations give days of warning, but fire, gas and flash flooding give minutes, and the twenty minute list covers both.
Ready.gov recommends knowing your routes and having a plan for pets and family members with mobility needs before an order arrives. The part worth adding from the county side of the desk is that most of the twenty minutes gets spent on decisions rather than on carrying. Households that have already decided who takes the dog, which car, and what the meeting point is are loaded and moving in eight minutes. Households deciding it live are still in the driveway at forty.
- Decide the routes now, on paper. Two out of your neighbourhood and one that avoids the interstate entirely.
- Name a meeting point outside the county, and a second one that does not require a phone to agree on.
- Write the pet plan down. Carriers, food, records and one address that will take animals.
Documents, and the hour that saves them
One hour with a scanner, once, protects the year after the event. It is the highest return of anything on this site.
Deeds, policies, prescriptions, immunisation records, account numbers, photographs of every room for the claim. A household that loses paperwork spends the following twelve months rebuilding it while trying to rebuild everything else. A household with a scan and an off site copy spends an afternoon. I have watched both versions of that year from the county desk, and it is not close.
Building both without buying twice
Buy the bin first, then build the bag from the bin’s overlap plus a small number of dedicated items.
- Build the stay put bin out of ordinary groceries and household items, which most people can do in one shopping trip.
- List the items in the bin that a person would also need away from the house, which is a shorter list than it looks.
- Buy dedicated duplicates only where the item genuinely cannot be shared: headlamp, water treatment, a copy of the documents.
- Pack the bag, then carry it around the block. Anything that made that walk unpleasant comes back out.
The one place we do argue for spending is the blade. A household ends up wanting a knife in both objects, and the honest options are one good one that moves between them or two cheap ones that both disappoint. We take the first, for reasons set out in how many knives a household kit actually needs.
The bin itself is covered in more detail in what belongs in a 72-hour kit, and everything else about leaving, routes and destinations sits under evacuation and route planning.
Expert note from Renata Sowell, water and evacuation editor
The bag people build is almost always for a wilderness they will never be in. You are going to a cousin’s house in the next county or a school gymnasium. Pack for a bad hotel with no shops, not for the backcountry, and put half the weight you saved into documents and medication.
Expert note from Dan Brackett, founder and former distribution lineman
Keep a quarter tank of fuel as your floor, all year. Every evacuation I have watched from the line side had a queue at the one station still running, and half the people in it did not need to be there. That queue is where the twenty minutes goes.