The Northeast emergency checklist

Covers: Connecticut, Washington, DC, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont

This is an emergency checklist for Northeast households. It exists so your family can look after itself when normal services stop, whatever the cause: an ice storm, a nor'easter, a long city outage, or something nobody saw coming. The needs are the same every time: 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.

See your 3-day checklist

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What does an ice storm actually take out?

Power first, then everything that needs it. Heat goes, because most furnaces need electricity even when they burn gas or oil. Water pumps in apartment buildings stop. Elevators stop. Store card readers stop, which makes cash on your checklist more than a suggestion. Ice-loaded lines snap faster than crews can restring them, and restoration after a bad storm is measured in days to weeks, town by town. A nor'easter adds its own sequence: heavy snow, coastal flooding, then the deep cold that follows the storm out. Your checklist assumes days without service, not hours.

How do you prepare in an apartment?

This region's hardest problem, and most preparedness advice ignores it. You can't run anything fuel-burning in an apartment, and your checklist respects that. If you have no safe way to burn anything, don't burn anything. The apartment answers are battery answers: a power station charged ahead of the storm runs phones, lights, and a CPAP for days, and it's safe in a bedroom. Warmth comes from cold-rated sleeping bags, wool blankets, and layered clothing, and they work with no fuel, no flame, and no risk. Add a headlamp per person, because stairwells go dark, and enough no-cook food to skip the stove entirely.

How do you heat one room safely in a house?

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.

How much water, and why store it in a city?

One gallon per person, per day. Four people for three days is 12 gallons; ten days is 40. City water feels permanent until a main breaks in the cold or a high-rise loses the pumps that lift water past the sixth floor. Boil-water notices follow the big breaks. Your checklist includes stored water in containers that fit an apartment closet, plus plain unscented bleach and purification tablets, with amounts, so a notice is an errand you already ran.

What about the storm you drive home in?

Nor'easters catch commuters. The vehicle items on your checklist exist for the highway that becomes a parking lot: blankets, water, food that survives a glovebox winter, and a phone charger that doesn't need the engine running. Keep the tank above half in winter. It costs nothing and buys you heat.

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.