Seventy-Two Hours Is a Start, Not a Finish
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Every fall about this time, the power companies start telling folks the same thing: have a kit that’ll carry your house for 72 hours. Three days of water, food, light, and medicine, ready to go before the winter storms show up.
That’s good advice. I want y’all to hear me say that first, because three ready days is three more than most houses have, and a winter outage is the most likely hard week any of us is gonna face. Ice takes the lines down, the roads go slick, and the store shelves empty out fast.
But can I tell you what 72 hours really is? It’s a start. It’s the floor, not the finish.
Here’s the problem with stopping at three days. The outages that actually test a house don’t read the brochure. An ice storm doesn’t promise to be done by Thursday. A job hiccup doesn’t end on schedule either. Three days of ready gets you to the end of day three, and then you’re in the same spot as the folks who never started, just three days later and a little more tired.
That’s why at our house we treat the 72 hour kit as step one, and the next step is a week. Not a bunker. Not a warehouse. A week of the true necessities, the stuff from the Need It bucket: water and a way to get more, real food with salt and fat in it, warmth in one room, light after dark, soap, medicine, and a way to cook. A week of that is a whole different feeling when the power’s been out four days and the news is saying two more.
And a week ain’t the end of the road either. It’s just the step after this one. That’s the whole pattern of getting ready the prudent way. Proverbs 22:3 says the prudent see danger and take cover. They don’t do it all in one weekend, and they don’t do it scared. They see what’s likely, they take the next honest step, and then the next one.
So if your house has nothing right now, build the 72 hours this weekend and be proud of it. That’s a real start. If you’ve already got the three days, let this be the nudge: stretch it to a week before the first cold front tests it for real.
Be ready before the rain. Or in this season, before the ice.