EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS · ALL HAZARDS
Best Storm Preparedness Gearof 2026
Hurricane, winter storm, tornado or a week-long outage: the supplies that matter are largely the same. Built around FEMA’s own kit checklist, not guesswork.
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People tend to build a hurricane kit, or a winter storm kit, or a tornado kit, as though each needs different equipment. They mostly do not. Every one of those events ends the same way: the power goes out, the water may stop being safe, the roads close, and you are on your own for somewhere between three days and two weeks.
That is why this guide is organised around what a storm actually does to you rather than what kind of storm it was. The federal government’s own preparedness guidance takes the same approach, and its checklist is the basis for what follows: one gallon of water per person per day, several days of non-perishable food, a battery or hand-crank radio with NOAA weather alerts, flashlight, first aid kit, spare batteries, whistle, dust mask, plastic sheeting and duct tape, sanitation supplies, a wrench for shutting off utilities, a manual can opener, local maps, and a charged phone with a backup battery.
Nearly every item below exists to satisfy one of those requirements properly, rather than technically. A phone charger in a drawer satisfies the checklist. One that still holds charge after eight months in a closet is the one you actually want.
3 picks
A gallon per person per day is the floor, not the target, and it has to cover washing as well as drinking. For a family of four planning on a week, that is twenty-eight gallons before you have brushed anybody’s teeth. Store what you can, and keep a way to make questionable water safe for when storage runs short.
Reliance Jumbo-Tainer 2.0 7-Gallon Water Container
Good to Know: Rigid, stackable and fitted with a hideaway spigot, so you can draw water without lifting a full jug. Stacking matters more than people expect once you are storing a week for a household.
Heads Up: Seven gallons is close to sixty pounds when full. Fill containers where they will be stored rather than filling and then carrying.
LifeStraw Family Emergency Water Purifier
Good to Know: Gravity-fed and built for household volumes rather than a single hiker, which is what you want when a boil-water notice covers a whole county. Removes bacteria, parasites and microplastics without power or chemicals.
Heads Up: Gravity filtration is slower than a tap. Start a batch before you need it rather than filtering on demand.
LifeStraw Personal Water Filter Straw
Good to Know: Weighs almost nothing and needs no batteries, chemicals or moving parts, which makes it the sensible thing to drop into every evacuation bag and glovebox in the house.
Heads Up: It is a drinking filter, not a supply. It solves the problem of being somewhere with bad water, not the problem of having no water at home.
5 picks
Outages are the common thread across every storm type. What you need depends on how long you expect to be dark and whether anything in the house is medically necessary. Candles are the leading cause of post-storm house fires, which is reason enough to own proper lights.
Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 Portable Power Station
Good to Know: Runs a fridge, CPAP machine or medical equipment for meaningful stretches and can recharge from a solar panel when the grid stays down, so it does not become dead weight on day three.
Heads Up: Solar panels are sold separately, and it is not a whole-house generator. Work out your actual must-run devices before sizing.
Goal Zero Lighthouse 600 Rechargeable Lantern
Good to Know: Lights a room rather than a spot, charges by USB or solar, and has a hand crank as a genuine last resort. It will also charge a phone from its own battery.
Heads Up: The hand crank is for emergencies, not routine charging. Treat it as the backup to the backup.
Streamlight Super Siege Rechargeable Lantern
Good to Know: Built to a work-site standard rather than a camping one, with an alternating flash mode for signalling and enough runtime to cover several nights on a low setting.
Heads Up: Rechargeable means it needs charging before the storm arrives. Put it on the pre-storm checklist or it will be flat when you need it.
Streamlight Siege Compact D-Cell Lantern
Good to Know: Runs on three common D cells for up to 295 hours on low, which is the whole point: when everything rechargeable is flat and the power has been out for five days, batteries are the thing you can still buy or borrow.
Heads Up: Stock the batteries with the lantern and rotate them annually. Alkaline cells left inside for years will leak and ruin it.
Black Diamond Spot 400-R Rechargeable Headlamp
Good to Know: A headlamp is the light you actually want when you are clearing a drain, checking a breaker box or carrying something in the dark, because both hands stay free. Has a red night-vision mode and a battery meter that tracks remaining runtime.
Heads Up: This one is rechargeable, so top it up before a storm arrives. Black Diamond also sells a AAA version if you would rather swap cells mid-outage.
2 picks
This is the one category people skip and the one that is hardest to improvise. Cell networks fail or congest during major events, and a phone alert is useless once the battery dies. A NOAA weather radio receives official warnings directly from the National Weather Service with no network in between.
Midland ER310 Emergency Crank Weather Radio
Good to Know: Receives NOAA alerts with tone activation so it wakes you for a warning overnight. Charges by solar, hand crank or USB, and doubles as a flashlight and phone charger.
Heads Up: Crank charging produces a small amount of power for a lot of effort. Keep it topped up by USB and treat the crank as a genuine last resort.
Midland ER310PRO Emergency Crank Radio
Good to Know: Same NOAA alerting with a larger integrated battery, so it works as a genuine phone charger rather than a token one. Sensible if it will be your only backup power.
Heads Up: A radio is still a poor substitute for a dedicated power bank if charging phones is your main concern.
2 picks
The point of emergency food is not flavour, it is that it needs nothing from you: no refrigeration, no long cook time, and ideally no more water than you have already stored. Keep a manual can opener with it, because an electric one is scrap metal during an outage.
Mountain House Just In Case 3-Day Emergency Food Supply
Good to Know: Freeze-dried with a very long shelf life, so it can sit untouched for years without rotation. Three days matches the minimum most preparedness guidance sets as a floor.
Heads Up: It needs hot water to rehydrate. Pair it with stored water and a way to boil, or it is not usable.
Mountain House Adventure Weekender Kit
Good to Know: A compact twelve-serving kit that is easy to drop into an evacuation bag, where weight and bulk matter more than total days covered.
Heads Up: This is a supplement to the three-day supply above, not a replacement for it. For a longer window at home, buy the larger kits.
2 picks
Storm injuries skew towards cuts from debris and glass, puncture wounds, burns and strains from moving things that are too heavy. A pharmacy first aid tin handles none of that well. Prescription medication is the other half of this category and no kit includes it for you.
Adventure Medical Kits Mountain Series Explorer First Aid Kit
Good to Know: Sized for a group over multiple days rather than one person on an afternoon walk, with proper wound management and trauma supplies instead of a box of assorted plasters.
Heads Up: No kit covers your prescriptions. Keep at least a week of essential medication rotated alongside it.
Adventure Medical Kits Pro Series Guide I Medical Kit
Good to Know: Professional-grade and built for someone responsible for other people, including a C-splint, CPR mask and stethoscope. The sensible choice if neighbours or extended family will end up at your house.
Heads Up: More kit is only useful if you know how to use it. Consider a basic first aid course alongside the purchase.
2 picks
Two jobs matter here: shutting off utilities if a line is damaged, and dealing with a fire when the fire service cannot reach you. Both are worth solving before the weather turns.
Leatherman Wave Plus Multi-Tool
Good to Know: Pliers, wire cutters, saw, screwdrivers and knife in something that lives in a pocket. Covers most of the improvised repair work a storm creates, and carries a long warranty.
Heads Up: A multi-tool is not a utility shutoff wrench. Keep a proper one at the gas meter as well.
First Alert HOME1 Rechargeable Home Fire Extinguisher
Good to Know: UL rated for the three fire types found in homes, and rechargeable rather than disposable, so a small discharge does not mean binning the unit.
Heads Up: Check the gauge twice a year. An extinguisher that has quietly lost pressure is worse than none, because you will reach for it.
2 picks
Federal guidance is specific about this and most people skip it: supplies belong in airtight bags inside a portable container, not scattered across a garage. If you have to evacuate, a kit you can carry in one trip is the difference between taking it and leaving it.
Plano Sportsman Trunk Medium Storage Box
Good to Know: Rugged latching trunk that stacks, keeps water and pests out, and is stiff enough to sit on or stand on. Two of these hold a household kit and stay light enough to actually carry.
Heads Up: Label the outside with the contents and the date you last checked it. A sealed unlabeled box gets opened last in an emergency.
SentrySafe CHW20221 Fire and Water Chest
Good to Know: Rated to protect papers from both fire and water, which matters because flooding and fire are the two ways storm damage destroys documents. Holds insurance policies, deeds, identification and backup drives.
Heads Up: A chest is portable, which also means it is stealable. Store it out of sight and keep a second copy of critical documents somewhere off-site.
5 picks
The least pleasant category and the one that separates people who have thought this through from people who have not. If the water is off, the toilet stops working within a flush or two, and sheltering in place has its own equipment list.
Reliance Luggable Loo Portable Toilet
Good to Know: A bucket-style toilet with a proper snap-on seat and lid. Unglamorous and genuinely essential once the water is off, which happens faster than people expect during a main break or a boil notice.
Heads Up: Buy the waste bags and an odour treatment at the same time. The toilet alone does not solve the problem.
SOL 90% Heat Reflective Emergency Blanket
Good to Know: Reflects the large majority of body heat, packs down to almost nothing, and doubles as a ground sheet or a temporary cover for a broken window. Worth having several rather than one.
Heads Up: This is emergency warmth, not comfort. If you lose heat in winter, you still want real sleeping bags or blankets as the primary answer.
Gorilla Tape Black Heavy Duty Duct Tape
Good to Know: Federal guidance lists plastic sheeting and duct tape together for sealing a room. Ordinary duct tape fails when wet or cold; this holds on rough, damp and dusty surfaces, which is exactly the condition storm damage creates.
Heads Up: Tape is a temporary patch, not a repair. Use it to stop water getting in until someone can fix it properly.
3M 8210 N95 Particulate Respirator
Good to Know: NIOSH-approved and the right protection for the dust, mould spores and debris that come with cleanup after flooding or structural damage. Cheap enough to keep a box on hand.
Heads Up: An N95 protects against particles, not gases or vapours. It is not protection against carbon monoxide or chemical fumes.
First Alert SMCO210 Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Alarm
Good to Know: Detects both smoke and carbon monoxide with a sealed ten-year battery, so it cannot be disabled by a flat cell. Generator exhaust and improvised heating are the two things that kill people after a storm, and both produce carbon monoxide.
Heads Up: One alarm is not enough. Fit one on every level of the home, including outside sleeping areas.
Check your power bank against the CPSC recall list
The Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled roughly 1,158,000 Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks, model A1263, sold between June 2016 and December 2022, after 19 reports of fires and explosions, two burn injuries and more than 60,000 dollars in property damage. Only certain serial numbers are affected. If you own one, check the serial against the manufacturer’s recall page before it goes in a kit, because a device that overheats in a closed cupboard during an outage is the worst possible failure.
Store water where it will live
A full seven-gallon container weighs close to sixty pounds. Decide where it is going first, then fill it there.
Rotate batteries once a year
Alkaline cells left in a device for years leak and destroy it. Pick a date you will remember, such as the start of hurricane season or the first frost, and check everything at once.
Photograph your documents now
Insurance policies, identification, deeds and bank records. A waterproof folder is good, an encrypted copy stored somewhere off-site is better, and doing both costs an afternoon.
Do not run a generator indoors
That includes a garage with the door open and a covered porch. Carbon monoxide from portable generators kills people after storms every single year, and a working CO alarm on every level of the house is the cheapest item on this entire page.
How many days should I actually plan for?
Do I need a portable power station or a generator?
Is a hand-crank radio worth it if I have a phone?
What do people most often forget?
How often should the kit be checked?
How does NME choose and verify what appears here?
Build it before you need it
The worst time to assemble a kit is the afternoon a warning is issued, when the shelves are already empty. Start with water, light and a weather radio, then add from there. Read how we test and rank in our editorial methodology.
