PLN-10 · Family Emergency Plan · Lesson 03

Equipment Planning

What you can pick up and carry, organized by what each piece of it is for.

BLUF: Contacts, rally points, triggers, and documents tell you who, where, when, and what paperwork. This lesson covers what you carry: four equipment tiers built around intent rather than item lists, a Get Home Bag packed for the walk you mapped in Lesson 02, a medical kit bought by contents rather than piece count, and the equipment your pets need. By the end, the bag, bin, and vehicle checklists in your workbook should be complete, with every item’s location written down.

Gear by Intent, Not by Item

Lessons 01 and 02 settled who, where, and when. This lesson is about what you can actually pick up and carry. It comes third on purpose: equipment bought before those decisions are made tends to answer the wrong question. A bag is only as good as the plan it serves. A bag packed for a weekend in the woods is a poor fit for a six-mile walk home from the office in work shoes.

The plan organizes equipment into four tiers. They overlap in contents, and that is fine. What separates them is intent: what situation each one is built for, and therefore how long it has to last and where it has to be.

Tier	Lives	Built for
Get Home Bag (GHB)	In your vehicle or at your workplace	Getting you from wherever the day finds you back to home, or to a rally point. Not a long-duration kit.
Bug Out Bag (BoB)	At home, ready to grab	Leaving home in a hurry, with minutes of warning: a house fire, a wildfire nearby, an evacuation after a derailment or an overturned tanker. Assumes you may not be back for a while.
Bug Out Bin or Box	At home, near the exit or the vehicle	Evacuations with lead time, such as a hurricane forecast days out. Carries the bulkier, longer-duration items the BoB has no room for.
Vehicle emergency supplies	In each vehicle, permanently	Keeping the vehicle moving or recovering it: power, tools, and traction gear.

Away from homeNo warning

At homeMinutes of warning

At homeDays of warning

Get Home Bag
only what you carry

Bug Out Bags
grab and go

Bin + every Bug Out Bag
time to load the bulky items

Vehicle emergency supplies: in every vehicle, every day, whatever the warning

Figure 3.1 The right tier follows from two questions: where are you, and how much warning do you have? Away from home with no warning, you have only what you carry. At home with minutes, you grab the bags. With days, there is time for the bin as well. The vehicle kit sits outside this scale because it is always aboard.

Same bag, different intent

The pair most often confused is the GHB and the BoB, because they can look almost identical. The difference is the assumption behind each. A GHB assumes you are coming home shortly. A BoB assumes you might not be. That changes how much water, food, and clothing each carries, and it changes where each one lives: the GHB goes where you are when something happens; the BoB stays where you will be when you have to leave.

If your GHB lives in a vehicle you expect to evacuate in, it can supplement the BoB. But don’t build the plan on that. Vehicles break down, run out of fuel, get stuck in traffic, and get taken to work by the other adult in the house on exactly the wrong day.

Knowledge Check

A hurricane is forecast to reach your coast in three days, and an evacuation order for your zone looks likely. Which equipment tier is this situation built for?

A. The Get Home Bag in the car, since the family will drive out and the vehicle is where that bag already lives. B. The vehicle emergency supplies alone, since the main risk on an evacuation route is a breakdown or getting stuck. C. The Bug Out Bin, loaded with the bags, since days of warning leave time to take the bulkier, longer-duration items. D. The Bug Out Bag on its own, since it is the evacuation bag and was packed to cover leaving home in a hurry with little notice.

Knowledge Check

What is the essential difference between a Get Home Bag and a Bug Out Bag?

A. A GHB assumes you will be home again shortly; a BoB assumes you may not be back home for some time. B. A GHB is a smaller version of the BoB with the same purpose, sized to fit in a desk drawer or under a car seat. C. A GHB stays at home for the family to grab, while a BoB rides in the car so it is ready whenever you are out. D. A GHB is packed for one adult, while a BoB is packed for the whole household and carried by whoever leaves.

Packing for the Walk You Planned

Lesson 02 set a rule that shapes the GHB directly: at least one rally point must be reachable on foot from every place your family spends the day. The GHB is what makes that walk possible. Pack it for the distance and conditions of the actual route you mapped, not for an imagined wilderness trip.

In practice that means walking shoes and socks if you work in anything else; weather gear for the season; enough water for the walk; a light; a printed copy of your route and the key numbers from your roster; and any daily medication you would need before you got home. A GHB that is heavy enough to make you leave it in the car has failed at its one job, so keep it to what the walk requires.

Children’s bags follow the same logic at a smaller scale. A child at school usually can’t keep a bag there, so their part of the GHB tier is often the wallet card from Lesson 01 and whatever the school allows in a backpack.

Knowledge Check

Lesson 02 required at least one rally point reachable on foot from every origin. What does that rule mean for a Get Home Bag kept at your workplace?

A. It should hold the household’s copy of the Contingency Binder, since the walk may end at a rally point instead of home. B. It should be packed for the walk you mapped from work, with footwear, weather gear, and water for that distance. C. It should be built around the vehicle, since the vehicle emergency supplies already cover what you would need to walk. D. It can be kept minimal, since a rally point close enough to walk to means you will reach shelter before you need much.

Vehicle Emergency Supplies

Every vehicle the household relies on gets its own permanent kit. These items are not for the people; they are for the vehicle, and they are what keep a breakdown or a ditch from turning into a stranding.

Category	Examples
Power	Jumper cables, a portable jump pack, spare fuses
Tools	Shovel, axe, bottle jack, lug wrench
Traction and recovery	Cat litter or sand for traction, snow chains where you need them, a tow strap, tire sealant

Check the kit when the seasons change. Chains you will never need in July still need to be in the car by November, and a jump pack that has sat uncharged for a year will not start anything.

The Medical Kit

Buy deliberately, not by piece count. Kits advertised as “200-plus pieces” are frequently padded with one low-value item, usually adhesive bandages, so the number on the box tells you very little about what is inside. A curated kit from a reputable source is worth the extra cost over a generic marketplace listing. Whatever you buy, check it against these categories rather than against its count:

Category	At minimum
Wound care	Adhesive bandages, gauze pads, roll gauze, medical tape, triangular bandages
Medications	Antihistamine, antidiarrheal, antacid, antibacterial ointment
Tools	Thermometer, tweezers or a tick remover, trauma shears
Other	Hot and cold packs, eye irrigation, an emergency dental kit, a medical reference manual

Household prescriptions are not part of the kit itself, but the plan has to account for them. Every bag tier that might keep someone away from home should hold or point to their daily medications, and the prescription list you put in the binder in Lesson 02 is what lets a pharmacy elsewhere refill them. A kit is also only as useful as the person using it; this course does not teach first aid, and a basic course is worth more than any upgrade to the kit.

Knowledge Check

You are comparing first aid kits online. One is advertised as 250 pieces, another as 90. What is the best way to choose between them?

A. Choose the 250-piece kit, since a larger count gives the household more supplies to work with in a long emergency. B. Choose whichever kit carries the most trauma supplies, since serious bleeding is the most dangerous injury to plan for. C. Choose either one, since any sealed commercial kit meets the same basic standard and the contents are largely the same. D. Check what each kit actually contains against the plan’s categories, since piece counts are often padded.

Pet Equipment

In Lesson 02 you recorded who is responsible for each animal. Their equipment follows the same tiers as yours, and it is easy to forget until the moment you need it.

Item	Why
At least five days of food and a water bowl in every applicable bag or bin	Pet food is hard to find in an evacuation, and an animal cannot share most of yours.
A spare leash	A second leash is backup for the one in daily use, which will be wherever you left it.
A rotation schedule for bagged food	Bagged pet food has a shorter shelf life than most shelf-stable human food, so it has to be swapped out on its own schedule.
Basic pet first aid, especially for paw pads	Cut or scraped paw pads are among the most common minor injuries for a dog on an evacuation route.

Knowledge Check

Why does the plan call for a separate rotation schedule for bagged pet food kept in the bags and bins?

A. Because pet food has to be repackaged into airtight containers every month to stay safe for the animal to eat. B. Because bagged pet food keeps for less time than most shelf-stable human food, so it needs its own timetable. C. Because pet food attracts pests far more quickly than human food, so it has to be swapped out every few weeks. D. Because emergency shelters accept pets only when the food brought along with them is less than thirty days old.

Into the Workbook

By the end of this lesson, these sections of the Family Emergency Plan Workbook should be complete:

Workbook section	What goes in
Get Home Bag checklist	One per adult, packed for the foot route from that person’s workplace, with where the bag lives.
Bug Out Bag checklist	One per household member, including pets, with where each bag is stored.
Bug Out Bin inventory	The bulky, longer-duration items, and where the bin is kept.
Vehicle kit checklist	One per vehicle, with a note of the seasonal items and when they go in.

Write down the stored location of every bag and bin as you go. It looks like a small detail. It is the one the next lesson depends on.

Why This Matters Later

Equipment only earns its keep if someone can find it and grab it fast, and that someone may not be the person who packed it. Lesson 04 turns this inventory into a priority-ordered checklist for the last few minutes before you leave, with every bag named by where it lives.

Complete this lesson’s Knowledge Check to continue

← Lesson 02: Movement, Triggers, and Documentation | Course Map

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