Documents, money, go-bags

The page above specifies a good bag. This is about which bag you will actually reach for, and the three items in it that quietly do not work.

Two different bags, and only one gets used

Most British emergencies end with advice to stay indoors. Storms, power failures, water contamination, industrial incidents and cold snaps are all handled in place. Evacuation is for the localised and immediate: a fire, a gas escape, a flood coming up the street.

That means the 72-hour bag on the parent page is built for the rarer case, and the case that actually arrives needs something smaller and faster.

The grab bag is the one that matters most and costs least. It is a small rucksack holding the things that are irreplaceable or immediately needed, and its whole design principle is that a frightened person can pick it up in the dark without deciding anything.

Medicine, glasses and hearing aid batteries belong in the grab bag, not the big one. Somebody who leaves the house without their glasses is far less capable for the rest of the week, and the person most likely to forget them is the person who needs them most.

A phone charger and a battery pack belong there too, because a phone at 8 per cent is the commonest way people lose contact.

The weight problem

A 72-hour bag that cannot be carried is a shelf ornament. The parent page's list, fully assembled, is heavy, and the failure shows up only when somebody tries to walk with it.

• Load each person's bag and walk for an hour with it. On pavement, at pace, in the shoes you would actually be wearing. This single test changes more bags than any packing list.
• Children carry a light bag with their own things in it, and an adult carries their supplies. A child's bag is a comfort item, a snack, a drink, a torch and their card. Nothing else.
• The group moves at the pace of the slowest carrier, so an overloaded strong adult does not help; it just moves the problem.
• Water is the heavy item at a kilogram a litre. Carry one litre and the means to make more, which is exactly what the parent page specifies and exactly what gets over-packed anyway.
• Wheels beat straps where the ground allows. A wheeled case, a wheelbarrow, a bike with panniers, a pushchair. This is unglamorous and it is how people actually move things.

Then repack for the season. A bag packed in July and never opened is a bag with no gloves in it.

Cash, and the change problem

The parent page is right that cash is the answer when card machines and cash machines die together, and the denomination detail decides whether it works.

Nobody can give change. A shop running on a calculator and a cash tin, or a neighbour selling you fuel, has a float of whatever was in the drawer. A fifty pound note is close to useless in that situation, and plenty of UK retailers refuse them as a matter of policy even in normal times.

Split it. Some in the grab bag, some in the 72-hour bag, some at home, some in the car. A single envelope holding all of it is a single point of failure, and the whole argument for cash is redundancy.

Tell one other adult where it is. Cash nobody can find is not a reserve.

The USB stick nobody can open

The parent page specifies a USB stick with encrypted scans, and the instinct is right. The execution usually fails, for three reasons that are all foreseeable.

1. There is no device to read it on. A USB stick needs a computer, and a computer needs power and time. In the first day of an emergency, nobody has either.
2. The passphrase is in the password manager, which is on the phone, which is what you are trying to recover.
3. The software has moved on. An encrypted archive made with a tool nobody now has is a file you own and cannot read.

So keep both, and treat them as different tools.

• Paper, in the waterproof pouch, is the one that works under stress. Photocopies of the passport and licence, the insurance policy number, the repeat prescription list, account numbers, the family card. Somebody can read paper by torchlight, wet, with no battery.
• The digital copy is for the house-burned-down case, where paper is gone and time is available. Keep it off-site rather than in the same bag, and make sure at least two people can open it.
• Write the recovery route down. Not the password. The route: which service, which account, who else has access. A sealed envelope at a relative's house does this job perfectly well.

Test it once a year by actually opening it. Nearly every household that tries this discovers something has broken.

The photographs that pay out

The most valuable ten minutes in this whole chapter costs nothing and almost nobody does it.

Walk through the house filming or photographing every room, with cupboards and wardrobes open. Get the serial numbers of the expensive things. Do the loft, the garage and the shed.

That is what settles an insurance claim after a fire or a flood, because the difficulty in a claim is almost never whether the event happened. It is evidencing what was in the room. A household that can show what it owned is in an entirely different position from one relying on memory while living in a hotel.

Store it off-site, with the digital documents, and redo it when something significant changes.

And read the policy for the two things that catch people out: whether you are covered for flood at all, and what the accidental damage and single-item limits are. Both are found out at claim time by people who assumed otherwise. See insurance and what documents to hold.