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Almost nobody gets the hurricane. Almost everybody gets the evening the lights go out and stay out for a few hours. Nothing on this page asks you to buy anything. It assumes you are standing in a dark house right now.
Why this page exists
For the great majority of households, the emergency that actually arrives is a power outage. In 2024 the average American electricity customer lost power about one and a half times. Set aside the hurricanes and the ice storms, and those interruptions add up to roughly two hours across an entire year.
That is the honest shape of it. Not a catastrophe. A Tuesday evening with no lights, a refrigerator you are suddenly thinking about, and a house that starts drifting toward too cold or too warm.
It still deserves a plan, not because something worse is coming, but because this is the thing that comes. A short outage rewards a handful of small habits and punishes a few specific mistakes. Both are below.
What the numbers say
The U.S. Energy Information Administration tracks how long the average customer goes without power each year. Excluding major storms, that number has held near two hours annually for more than a decade.
Add major events back in and it swings hard with the weather. 2024 came in near eleven hours, the highest in ten years, with roughly eighty percent of it traced to Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton. Most outages are short. A few are not, and where you live decides which kind you tend to get.
Right now
None of this requires equipment you had to buy in advance. Work down the list.
01
Text it to yourself, put it on the refrigerator door, or say it out loud to someone. Almost every decision below depends on how long this has been going on, and elapsed time is exactly what memory gets wrong once you are tired and moving around in the dark.
02
Look at a neighbor's windows or the streetlights. If their power is on and yours is not, check your main breaker before calling anyone. A tripped main looks exactly like a neighborhood outage from inside the house.
03
Utilities dispatch crews based on reported outages, and households routinely assume a neighbor called when nobody has. If your phone has no service at all, treat that as information rather than a nuisance. It usually means the event is larger than your street, and a battery radio has just become your best source instead of your backup one.
04
The clock starts now, and every door opening runs it faster. Decide what you need before you open it, then take it all in one trip.
05
Your phone works for the next few minutes. Use it to locate real light while you can still see. Then leave one lamp switched on so you know the moment power returns, including at three in the morning.
06
Computers, televisions, and anything with a circuit board can take a hit from the surge when service is restored. A surge protector helps. Unplugged helps more.
Before anything else
Everything else on this page assumes a typical house on a typical evening. If any of the following describes yours, the order changes and backup power stops being a comfort question.
An oxygen concentrator, a CPAP, a feeding pump. This outranks the refrigerator, the lights, and everything else here. Many utilities keep a medical priority list for restoration and outage notification. Ask about enrolling on a quiet weekday, not tonight.
Insulin and several other drugs have their own storage rules, and they are not the food rules further down this page. Check the label or call the pharmacy rather than reasoning by analogy.
No power means no pump, which means no running water and no working toilet, starting immediately rather than after four hours. Fill containers early if you have warning.
If the basement stays dry because of it, an outage during heavy rain becomes a water problem before it is a power problem.
Infants, older adults, anyone ill or recovering. Their margin in a cold or hot house is much shorter than yours, and it closes quietly.
There is no good version of solving a medical power problem by flashlight. If one of these applies, the answer belongs in a plan, not in the moment.
The part that causes harm
Carbon monoxide is colorless, odorless, and fast. The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that portable generators alone are associated with roughly 85 to 100 deaths a year in the United States. A single portable generator can produce as much carbon monoxide as hundreds of cars.
The rules are short, and there are no exceptions to them.
At least 20 feet from the house, with the exhaust pointed away from doors, windows, and vents. Never in a garage, basement, crawlspace, shed, or carport, and never on a porch. Opening a door or a window does not make an enclosed space safe.
No charcoal grill, no camp stove, no outdoor propane heater, not for heat and not for cooking. Use only equipment labeled for indoor use.
A flashlight or a battery lantern does the same job without the second emergency. Candle fires cluster in exactly these hours.
Battery-powered carbon monoxide alarms belong on every level of the house and outside sleeping areas. When one sounds, get everyone out, then call 911. Do not investigate first.
Food safety
Federal guidance is specific here, and all of it assumes the doors stay closed.
4
Hours
48
Hours
24
Hours
A full freezer holds twice as long as a half-full one because the frozen food is doing the work. If you know weather is coming, fill the empty space with jugs of water and freeze them. They buy time now and become drinking water later.
After four hours without power, discard refrigerated perishables: meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, soft cheeses, cut fruit and vegetables, leftovers, and deli items. High-acid items such as mustard, ketchup, jams, jellies, and vinegar dressings are fine.
Frozen food can be refrozen if it still contains ice crystals or is at 40°F or below. Texture may suffer. Safety does not. Discard anything perishable that has sat at room temperature for two hours, or one hour if the room is above 90°F.
Never taste food to decide whether it is safe, and remember that reheating contaminated food does not make it safe. If you have a cooler and ice, move refrigerated perishables into it at the four-hour mark and keep it at 40°F or below. An appliance thermometer in each compartment turns all of this from guesswork into a reading.
Temperature
The instinct that helps in one will hurt you in the other.
The short list
Find the manual release cord and pull it once so you know how it works. A car shut inside is a small problem that becomes a large one.
Gas pumps need electricity. Keeping the tank above half is the cheapest preparation available to anyone.
A gallon per person per day is the working figure. Municipal water usually keeps flowing. A well does not.
Lower the brightness and use airplane mode when you are not actively using it. A phone you keep checking drains far faster than one you leave alone.
Card readers need power too. A small amount in the house covers a gas station or a grocery run on a generator.
The part nobody plans for
In account after account of long outages, the detail people remember is not the equipment. It is that they finally met their neighbors.
An outage is one of the few events that puts everyone on a street into the same situation at the same moment. Knocking on a door to ask whether someone has heat, or a way to charge a phone, or anything in the freezer worth saving, costs nothing and gets remembered for years. If someone nearby is elderly, lives alone, or depends on powered equipment, that knock may matter more than anything else on this page.
It is also the quiet argument for getting ready at all. A household that is steady has something to offer. A household that is scrambling does not.
If it lasts longer than a day
Day two is a different set of decisions: the freezer, fuel while stations still have power, hygiene, and whether staying home is still the right call. These guides pick up where this page ends.
The household protocol once an outage stops being a short one, with a printable copy for the binder.
A day-by-day map of a two-week outage: water, hygiene, fuel, air quality, and morale.
What to save, what to cook first, and what has to go, in more detail than this page allows.
Lighting, batteries, generators, heating and cooling without the grid. The full cluster.
Read these first
Most people waste their first hundred dollars on the wrong things. A few minutes of reading here keeps you from the common mistakes before you spend anything.
Fewer, better things. What to skip, and why a closet full of gear is not a plan.
Water before food. Health and money before gear. A simple order that keeps you grounded.
The rotation habit that builds a supply at no extra cost and nothing goes to waste.
What lives in the car and the day bag for the times a normal day does not go to plan.
When you are ready for what is next
This page assumed you had nothing ready. The next one fixes that. Water, food, light, medicine, and a household plan, built from what you mostly already own.
Continue to the first 72 hours