Disaster Kit Contents: A Comparison of Published Guidelines for Household Preparedness Supplies

Abstract

This paper discusses the comprehensiveness and specificity of published guidelines for household disaster kits. A search was conducted via the Internet to identify disaster kit lists, which were then analyzed for major themes and types of contents. While the specificity of recommendations and the number of disaster kit items varied widely across the sampled lists, several key categories of contents were found in the majority of them. The immense variability across the sampled lists suggests that a “gold standard” is necessary for disaster kit guidelines in order to best aid the public in their preparedness efforts.