Emergency Preparedness Checklist: What FEMA Says You're Missing

Emergency preparedness is more than a stockpile, and this video uses FEMA survey data to show which parts of a household emergency plan most Americans skip and how to close the gap in one afternoon. FEMA's 2025 Annual Preparedness Survey found that 81 percent of Americans have gathered emergency supplies, 48 percent have created an emergency plan, and roughly 32 percent have practiced that plan in the past year. The gap between intending to prepare and actually preparing has closed by only 2 percent since 2013. This video walks through the five parts of household emergency preparedness (supplies, the plan, practice, information, and documents and money), explains what FEMA and Ready.gov recommend for each, and finishes with a three-hour checklist that covers most of what people leave out. It also corrects a widely repeated statistic about how many Americans have emergency supplies. What's covered in this video: - The three FEMA numbers that matter: 81 percent have supplies, 48 percent have a plan, and about 32 percent have practiced it in the past year. - Why the claim that "only 48 percent of Americans have emergency supplies" misreads FEMA's 2023 National Household Survey, which measured people who assembled or updated supplies in the previous 12 months. - How the share of people who assembled or updated supplies rose from 33 percent in 2022 to 48 percent in 2023. - Ready.gov water guidance of one gallon per person per day, with three days as the minimum and two weeks as the goal, and why a family of four needs 56 gallons for two weeks. - Water treatment with unscented household bleach less than a year old, following EPA guidance, and calcium hypochlorite sold as pool shock. - The no-cook food layer for a multi-day power outage: canned fish, canned chicken, canned beans, canned fruit, peanut butter and a manual can opener. - Food price changes in the BLS Consumer Price Index for August 2026, including canned fish up 6.1 percent and eggs down 23 percent. - USDA