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The First 100 · Tier One of Ten · Items 1–10

The First Night

Your household can move safely through a night with no power, receive official warnings, keep a phone charged, and detect the two hazards that kill people during outages.

Why this tier, in this order

Every disruption, whatever its cause, begins the same way for the household living through it: the lights go out, the phones start draining, and people move through a dark house trying to figure out what is happening. The first tier is built entirely for that night. Nothing in it stores food, treats water, or generates power. It does something more fundamental. It keeps people from getting hurt in their own home, keeps one channel of official information open, and puts detection in place before anything on this list is allowed to burn fuel.

That last point is the structural rule of the whole document. The two most common ways an outage kills someone are fire and carbon monoxide, and both are detection problems before they are anything else. Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms sit at items 4 and 5, and the first fuel-burning appliance does not appear until item 47, forty-two positions later. That gap is not an accident of arrangement. It is the single most important thing this list does differently from nearly every list we examined, and it costs you nothing except doing things in the right order.

This tier also improves ordinary life immediately, which is a pattern you will see throughout. A kitchen fire extinguisher, working smoke alarms, and a charged power bank are not waiting for a disaster. They are earning their place every ordinary week.

The threshold

Your household can move safely through a night with no power, receive official warnings, keep a phone charged, and detect the two hazards that kill people during outages.

Rough tier cost: $150 to $275.

Items 01–05

LED headlamp, one per person

$per person

Hands-free light so both hands stay free for stairs, latches, and a child's hand. One per person removes the argument about who gets the flashlight.

Why here. The first minute of the first outage is a dark house with people moving through it. Falls are among the most common injuries of a power outage and among the cheapest to prevent.

“A headlamp is camping gear. A flashlight is fine.”

A flashlight occupies a hand. Everything you will actually do in a dark house, carrying a child to bed, finding the breaker box, opening the cooler without letting the cold out, works better with two hands. Headlamps also cost less than the flashlights most people buy. If you already own good flashlights, you are not behind, but add headlamps before you add a second flashlight.

The checklist

Battery LED lantern

Area light for the room where everyone gathers.

Why here. Ten headlamps pointed at each other is a miserable evening. One lantern on a table turns a dark room back into a room. This is the item that changes how an outage feels rather than what it costs.

“Candles do this for a dollar and always have.”

The numbers on this one are worth knowing exactly. NFPA data attributes an average of over 7,000 home fires per year to candles, roughly twenty every day, with candles used for light during power loss posing a particular risk of fatal fire. When NFPA reviewed 117 fatal home candle fires, the home was without electrical power in about a quarter of them, accounting for a third of the deaths. The U.S. Fire Administration's guidance is direct: use flashlights, not candles, in a power outage. There are no candles anywhere on this list. It is the single most common item on other lists that we deliberately excluded, and we would rather argue about it than quietly include it.

Our review The checklist

Batteries sized to your lights and radio

Check what the headlamps, lantern, and radio actually take, then buy for those.

Why here. Items 1, 2, and 8 are inert without this. People buy the devices and skip the spares, then discover the problem on night two.

“Rechargeables are better and you put them at 61.”

They are better, and they are at 61 because they need a charger and a charging habit, which is a system rather than a purchase. Disposables need nothing. Lithium disposables in particular hold charge for years in a drawer, which is exactly the duty cycle of emergency equipment. Buy disposables now, add the rechargeable system at 61, keep both.

Smoke alarms, every level and every bedroom

NFPA guidance is one on every level including the basement, inside every bedroom, and outside each sleeping area. Interconnected is better, so that one alarm sounds all of them.

Why here. Almost every home has some smoke alarms. Far fewer have all of them, in the right places, working. This is the highest-value hour you will spend on this entire list and most of it is testing what you already own.

“This is a code requirement, not a prep.”

Code requirements are minimums, they are enforced at sale and inspection rather than continuously, and the batteries in your house right now are older than you think. More to the point, the two most common ways an outage kills someone are fire and carbon monoxide, and both of them are detection problems before they are anything else.

Our review The checklist

Carbon monoxide alarms, battery or battery backup

CPSC guidance is battery-operated or battery-backup alarms on every level of the home and outside sleeping areas, with interconnected alarms recommended.

Why here. Nothing on this list burns fuel until item 47. Detection comes first, deliberately, and it stays ahead of every combustion item that follows.

“I don't have a generator, so I don't need this.”

Carbon monoxide during outages does not come mainly from generators. It comes from a gas range used for heat, a charcoal grill brought into a garage, a car warmed up with the door open, a furnace that starts misbehaving when power returns. It also comes from the neighbor's generator through a shared wall. And note the guidance says battery or battery backup: a plug-in-only CO alarm is dark during exactly the outage where you need it.

Our review The checklist

Items 06–10

ABC fire extinguisher for the kitchen

Multipurpose dry chemical, mounted where you can reach it without crossing the stove.

Why here. Cooking is the leading cause of home fires in ordinary life, and the first tier should improve ordinary life. It also precedes every alternative cooking method on this list by forty items.

“One extinguisher is not enough for a house.”

Correct, and a second and third belong near the garage and the utility room. We are sequencing, not finishing. The kitchen unit is the one that gets used.

Our review The checklist

High-capacity USB power bank

Enough capacity for several full phone recharges.

Why here. The phone is the alert system, the family locator, the flashlight of last resort, and the way you tell someone you are all right. It is also the first thing to die.

“You said days. Capacity claims are marketing.”

We changed this line after a reviewer pushed on it. The honest statement is "several recharges," because runtime depends on capacity, phone, screen use, and how cold the room is. Anyone promising you days is not measuring.

The checklist

NOAA weather radio, battery or hand-crank

Tone alert so it wakes you.

Why here. Cell networks fail in the events where warnings matter most, and the broadcast warning system does not depend on them.

“My phone gets Wireless Emergency Alerts. This is redundant.”

It is redundant, and that is the argument for it rather than against it. WEA depends on a functioning tower, a charged phone, and a phone you are near. A weather radio depends on none of those, costs less than a tank of gas, and runs on the batteries you bought at item 3.

Our review The checklist

Manual can opener

Why here. This is the least interesting item on the list and one of the highest consequence. Households routinely store canned food and lose the ability to open it.

“Everyone already has one.”

Many households genuinely do not, because electric openers and pull-tabs replaced them. Check your drawer before you dismiss this. If you find one, test it. The cheap ones fail on the fourth can, which is not when you want to find out.

Our review

Cash in small bills

Fives, tens, and twenties. Enough for several days of fuel, food, and a hotel night.

Why here. Card networks, ATMs, and point-of-sale systems all depend on the same power and connectivity that just failed. Stores that stay open go cash-only within hours.

“Cash is worthless in a real collapse. Buy silver.”

This list is not built for collapse. It is built for the outage, the storm, the boil-water notice, and the two weeks after a hurricane, which are the things that actually happen. In all of those, cash works and precious metals do not, because the clerk at the open gas station cannot make change for a silver round. Every system on our review panel reached the same conclusion independently.

“Nobody should keep cash at home.”

A reasonable worry, and the answer is a modest amount in a fire-resistant place, which arrives at item 53. The alternative is a functioning store you cannot buy from.

Keep the sequence

One tier at a time, in order.

The full list Tier Two

Back to the full hundred-item list