The Midwest & Great Lakes emergency checklist

Covers: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin

This is an emergency checklist for Midwest and Great Lakes households, built for a region that gets winter's worst and summer's most violent storms. The cause changes; the needs don't: water, food, heat, light, and information. Start with the 3-day list. For a family of four, that begins with 12 gallons of water, and every amount is calculated for this region and your household.

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What did the 2020 derecho prove?

That this region's grid can fail in August, not just January. Straight-line winds crossed several states in a single day, flattened crops and power lines together, and parts of Iowa waited more than a week for power in summer heat. A derecho gives less warning than a blizzard and does hurricane-class wind damage a thousand miles from any coast. The checklist that gets you through a winter outage gets you through a summer one; the only change is which sections you reach for first.

How do you get through a blizzard outage?

The cold here settles in and stays, so the heat plan matters more than the snow plan.

Pick the smallest room you can all sleep in, seal it, and heat that room only. Your checklist covers what that takes: an indoor-safe propane heater sized for a bedroom, the fuel to run it, sleeping bags rated for real cold, and wool blankets. It also includes carbon monoxide alarms, because the deadliest mistakes of February 2021 were heating mistakes. Never run a generator, grill, or camp stove indoors. If you burn anything for heat, a working CO alarm is part of the kit, not an extra.

Add this region's specifics: sleeping bags rated for real Midwest cold, a snow shovel and ice melt that live inside the house where you can reach them, and the LED bulbs on your checklist that keep rooms lit on battery power while the furnace fan is dark.

What about tornadoes?

A tornado gives you minutes, not days. Your checklist includes a weather radio that wakes you at 3 a.m. when your phone doesn't, and the cleanup basics for afterward: work gloves, tarps, and a way to shut off gas and water. Keep the kit where your shelter spot is, not in the garage you can't reach from the basement.

What about ice storms and the long thaw?

Freezing rain is the quiet grid-killer of this region. A quarter inch of ice adds hundreds of pounds to a span of line, and the outage maps stay red for days. The plan is the same one-warm-room plan as a blizzard, plus patience: keep the fridge and freezer closed, keep a battery bank for phones, and let the checklist's no-cook food carry the first days.

How much water?

One gallon per person, per day. Four people for three days is 12 gallons; ten days is 40. Deep cold bursts pipes and freezes rural wells here the same way it does further south, and a summer derecho can knock out a town's water plant with everything else. Stored water, plus plain unscented bleach and purification tablets with amounts, covers both seasons' versions of the same problem.

Pick your number of days

Start with 3 days, then build. Each list adds to the one before it.

Want the math behind the amounts? Read how we calculate quantities.