The first 72 hours without power

Outages fail in an order, and the order is the plan

A blackout is not one problem. It is four problems on four different clocks: refrigeration starts dying in hours, water pressure is uncertain from the first minute, anything medical that plugs into a wall is suddenly on its own battery, and the phone network degrades quietly while everyone assumes it is fine.

None of those clocks is a countdown you can read. They are just the order in which a normal house stops being normal — and knowing the order tells you what to touch first, which is the only real decision the first hour contains.

The refrigerator clock (FDA)

The US Food and Drug Administration publishes the numbers everybody half-remembers. Keep the doors shut and "the refrigerator will keep food cold for about 4 hours if it is unopened." A freezer holds longer: "A full freezer will keep the temperature for approximately 48 hours (24 hours if it is half full) if the door remains closed." Ready.gov repeats the same four-hour and 48-hour figures on its power outages page, which is a good sign you are reading a real number and not a forum number.

The thresholds are 40°F for the refrigerator and 0°F for the freezer, and FDA is blunt about what goes in the trash: refrigerated perishables — meat, poultry, seafood, milk, eggs, leftovers — that have sat above 40°F for four hours or more.

The part people get wrong is the test. You cannot smell or look your way to a decision; FDA says directly that you cannot rely on appearance or odor. The cheap fix is an appliance thermometer sitting in each box, so that when power returns you are reading a number instead of guessing.

• Refrigerator, door kept shut: about 4 hours (FDA).
• Full freezer: about 48 hours. Half full: about 24 (FDA).
• Above 40°F for four hours or more: perishables are discarded (FDA).
• Every door opening spends part of that budget. Decide what you want before you open it, and open it once.

Water pressure is not promised to you

Whether your tap keeps running depends on plumbing you did not choose. Municipal systems fed from elevated tanks can coast on gravity for a while; systems that depend on electric pumping cannot. A private well is simply an electric pump — when the power stops, so does the water, immediately.

The move is the same in all three cases and it costs nothing: fill containers in the first minutes, while pressure still exists. Ready.gov's planning figure is one gallon per person per day for several days, for drinking and sanitation. Our water guide covers treatment, storage, and the difference between a filter and a purifier in detail.

Lost pressure is also why boil-water advisories follow outages. A depressurized main can draw contamination in, so utilities issue the advisory before they have test results rather than after. Treat "we lost pressure" as "assume the water needs treatment until the utility says otherwise."

Anything medical that plugs into a wall

This is the failure that turns an inconvenience into an emergency, and it is the one with the longest lead time to fix — which means it gets fixed now, on a calm day, by making phone calls.

• Make the list: CPAP, oxygen concentrator, nebulizer, powered mobility, feeding pump, anything refrigerated. Write down each one's power draw and its battery runtime, if it has one.
• Call your utility and ask about medical-priority or medical-baseline registration. Programs vary by utility and state, and registration is not a promise about restoration order — but being on the list costs one phone call.
• Ask the prescriber and the pharmacist what the outage plan is for refrigerated medication, before the outage. Ready.gov's own line is to talk to your medical provider about a power outage plan for electrically powered devices and refrigerated medicines. We are not printing storage temperatures or substitutions here; that conversation belongs to people who can see your chart.
• Know where the nearest facility with power is — hospital, urgent care, a relative one grid segment over — and how you would get there without a phone for navigation.

Comms degrade quietly

Cell sites are not immune to the outage. They run on batteries, and some sites on generators, and that backup is finite and site-dependent — we have no general figure for how long it lasts. Two things then happen at once: sites drop as their batteries run down, and the surviving sites carry everybody in the area. It feels like "bad signal" and it is actually congestion stacked on reduced coverage.

Two habits handle most of it. Text rather than call — a text is a small burst that queues and retries, while a voice call needs a continuous channel the network cannot spare. And keep one receive path that does not care about the cellular network at all: a battery or hand-crank radio, ideally NOAA Weather Radio capable, is on Ready.gov's basic kit list for exactly this reason. It is the only information source in the house that still works when everything else is a rumor.

The thing that actually kills people: carbon monoxide

CPSC's report on non-fire carbon monoxide deaths (2011–2021 data) puts it at about 85 consumers a year in the US from portable generators alone. That is a body count, not a freak accident. It is the predictable result of running an engine too close to a house.

CPSC's guidance is to run portable generators outside only and at least 20 feet from the house, with the exhaust directed away from the home and away from any building a person can enter — not on a porch, not in a carport, not in an open garage. Ready.gov states the same 20-foot figure and adds windows, doors, and attached garages to the list. CPSC is explicit that opening doors or windows does not provide enough ventilation to prevent lethal CO buildup. You cannot ventilate your way out of a bad placement.

• Twenty feet from the house, outside only, exhaust pointed away (CPSC; Ready.gov states the same distance).
• Never in a garage, carport, porch, basement, or crawlspace. "Partially enclosed" is still enclosed.
• CO alarms with their own batteries or battery backup, on every level and outside sleeping areas. An alarm that lost power with the house is decoration.
• Generators with a CO shut-off feature exist, and CPSC tells buyers to look for them. It is the rare safety feature that costs nothing to prefer.
• The same rule covers charcoal grills, camp stoves, and the "heat the house with the oven" idea. Combustion indoors is the hazard; which appliance is doing it is a detail.

What the money buys

Three tiers, honestly. Each assumes you already did the free parts: fill containers early, keep the doors shut, write the plan down.

• $50 — a headlamp per person plus one handheld light, a stack of the right batteries, a battery or hand-crank radio, and an appliance thermometer for the fridge. This tier removes the fumbling and gives you an information source. It is the best fifty dollars on this page and most people never spend it.
• $200 — add a real power bank (enough to refill every phone in the house two or three times), a second set of lights, a five-gallon water container plus a few cases of bottled water, a camp stove with fuel used strictly outdoors, and a CO alarm if you do not have working ones.
• $500 — add a small lithium power station in the 250–500Wh range and a folding solar panel. This is the tier that keeps phones, lights, and a laptop alive indefinitely in sun. Whether it runs a specific medical device is arithmetic only you can do: read the watt-hours on the station and the watts on your device's label, and confirm the plan with the device maker or your prescriber — we are not going to estimate that for you. It is also where people overspend: a power station that cannot run your actual devices is furniture.
• Not on this list at any tier: a portable generator as a first purchase. It is the highest-consequence item in the category, it needs stored fuel, and it is the one that kills people. If you buy one anyway, buy the CO shut-off model and read the CPSC page first.

The common mistakes

• Opening the fridge to "check." Every check costs cold, and checking is how the four hours becomes two.
• Buying a generator and no CO alarm. See above; this is the one that has a body count.
• All the lights and no comms plan. When the network is congested and nobody agreed on a check-in time, a working flashlight does not help.
• Fuel and batteries bought during the event. Gas stations need power to pump, and the shelves empty in the first hours.
• Stocking food nobody in the house eats. A pantry you dislike is a pantry you never rotate, and expired food is not a supply.
• Forgetting the freezer is a resource. Frozen bottles of water are ice, insulation, and drinking water in one item, and they cost nothing to make today.

Turn this into a list you own

This page describes a failure order. A kit is what you do about it. If you want the shopping version — light, power, water, comms, first aid, in buy-first order and inside a budget you choose — our kit builder will assemble one from the catalog, and our 72-hour kit guide walks the same list item by item with the reasoning attached.