Emergency kit list with weight, volume and expiry dates

The walking rule of thumb is up to twenty percent of body weight for an adult — around fourteen kilograms at seventy. For a school-age child, ten percent and only their own gear. That is practice rather than regulation: beyond it, people cover less ground and injure themselves sooner. The tool sums a budget across everyone who is walking and shows the overshoot immediately.

Because a liter weighs a kilogram and the guideline is three liters per person per day. For four people over three days that is thirty-six liters and thirty-six kilograms. Hence the only sensible decision for a walk-out: carry a day of water and cover the rest with a filter and tablets. For a kit that stays at home, stored water is entirely justified.

Three days is the accepted minimum — roughly how long it takes for organized help to appear. Seven makes sense where you are hard to reach: an island, mountains, a house on its own, a winter region. Two weeks is worth keeping only at home and only in parts, because carrying it is not possible.

One is carried and the other is not, and everything else follows from that. A backpack has no room for a fire extinguisher, water containers or a bucket toilet; a home has no use for a foil blanket or a folding knife as the main tool. At home you can afford tinned food and stored water; in a backpack, only concentrates and a filter. That is why there are two modes here rather than one list with footnotes.

It depends on age, and the difference is fundamental. An infant needs formula, water to make it up, and nappies — ration bars are not food for them at all. A child under three needs jar food. Every child under twelve needs a familiar toy, and that is not sentiment: a calm child does not run off and does not need carrying. And every child, whatever their age, needs a card in a pocket with their name, adults' phone numbers and medical details.

A small animal travels in a carrier, a large one on a lead, and those are different things by weight and logistics. Pack food at the daily ration for the whole period, a folding bowl and a copy of the vaccination record: many shelters will not admit an animal without it. Water for animals is added on top of the human allowance.

Bottled water about a year, batteries five years, first aid supplies and dressings two years, medicines by their own dates, wet wipes dry out within a couple of years. The tool builds a calendar from the nearest expiries and adds a mandatory annual review: once a year the kit has to be opened completely, because the children have grown, the prescriptions changed, and somebody took the torch to the garage.

Because in a mass event local networks saturate first while long-distance often keeps working. The classic scheme is that every family member calls or texts one person outside the affected area, who becomes the hub. It works without the internet and when phones cannot reach each other.

The first is next to the house, for a fire or a gas leak: a neighboring doorway, a playground, one specific tree. The second is outside the district, in case the district is closed. The second one has to be reachable on foot and understandable to a child without a map.

Everything you enter — the household, phone numbers, medical details — stays in this browser so you do not retype it. The cards are meant for paper: paper is what works when a phone is flat or left behind. Clearing the site's data clears this too.

They are typical retail-pack figures, deliberately rounded. Your torch may weigh half as much and your first-aid kit twice as much. Precision is neither achievable nor needed: the decision is made by order of magnitude — "it fits" versus "it is twice too heavy" — and the model is confident about that.