Everything You Should Add to a Premade Emergency Kit, According to Disaster Experts

It’s weird to shop for something you hope to never use. Normally, that would be wasteful. Emergency kits are different. They’re like an envelope of money underneath the mattress — forget about it until you need it, and then it will be the most important thing you own. 

Disaster preparedness systems, which include emergency kits, are a $146 billion market as of 2020. But many kits are grossly inadequate for a real disaster. They tend to cover the basics, including dehydrated food, clean drinking water, lanterns and emergency blankets. But they usually lack emergency medical supplies, key tools needed to shut off gas or store large amounts of water as well as supplies tailored to specific natural disasters. 

A premade emergency kit is better than nothing, and supplementary items can fill in the gaps. Or, better yet, you can purchase all the supplies individually and assemble a kit by hand. 

“A kit needs to reflect the disaster you’re preparing for,” said Dr. Caroline Burmon, an Emergency Medicine Specialist at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in Brooklyn, New York who also has a thorough collection of emergency supplies at home. The contents of an emergency kit should be reflective of the types of disasters and emergencies in your geographic area. An earthquake kit stashed in a garage in Southern California can and should look different from one in hurricane-ridden Florida. And anyone who doesn’t live close to a hospital needs to gather medical supplies, a common blind spot in the average emergency kit sold on Amazon. 

Both the number and cost of natural disasters in the U.S. has increased in recent years, up 27% just between 2020 and 2019, and hundreds of billions of dollars more expensive compared to just 20 years ago. According to the Annual Preparedness Survey released by FEMA in 2020 of 5,000 adults, only 48% had constructed some form of an emergency plan despite 81% gathering supplies. A similar survey conducted in 2021 by Wells Fargo aligned with this data, showing that while 84% of Americans live in an area that’s experienced at least one severe natural disaster in the last three years, 71%of respondents said they don’t have a detailed plan. 

“One of the big differentiating points [in the kits available to purchase] is whether or not you’ll eventually have access to a hospital-like setting,” said Burmon. “A lot of kits assume you will, so you end up doing interventions that eventually necessitate definitive (hospital) care.” 

Despite their shortcomings, premade emergency kits are convenient, so SPY has gathered the best ones for the money out there, as well as a list of critical supplies that should be added. Any kit is better than no kit, and t’s worth the extra effort to make sure it’s comprehensive. 

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What to Pack in Your Emergency Kit, According to Experts

Both emergency preparedness experts we spoke to did not recommend premade kits, as they rarely include high-quality equipment and enough supplies to justify the heftier price tags. Instead, they both offered a necessary list of supplies that are easy to purchase and much more worth your dollar than a premade kit. 

Astrid Haaland is a Utah-based ER doctor who specializes in wilderness medicine and has been doing avalanche rescues for nearly five years. Both her and Burmon’s lists are very medically focused, but they highlight a critical blind spot in many premade kits. 

A SPY-curated selection from both of their lists is included below: