Every so often the internet decides to have a collective anxiety spiral about the electricity supply, and this week it is doing it again — long, dramatic speculation about grids failing and cities going dark. I am not going to relitigate any of it, partly because I am not an engineer and partly because the doom version is not useful to anyone standing in her kitchen at half past six with a child asking for pasta. What is useful is much smaller and much less cinematic: a single cupboard, sorted once, that turns a two- or three-day outage from an emergency into a long, slightly boring camping trip indoors.
I live in a flat with a hob that needs power to ignite, a lift, and a building intercom that is useless without electricity. I have been through enough storm outages to know that the problem is almost never heroic. It is that you cannot find a torch, the phone is on nine percent, and nobody knows whether the freezer food is still safe.
Start with water, light and warmth — in that order
Water first, because it is the one thing you cannot improvise. In many buildings, especially anything with a pump, the taps stop when the power does. Keep a few large bottles of drinking water somewhere cool and dark, and if a storm is forecast, fill the bath, a couple of buckets and every big pot you own. Bath water is not for drinking — it is for flushing the loo, which is the thing nobody thinks about until hour four.
Light next, and please make it battery light rather than candles. Head torches are unglamorous and completely transformative: you can cook, read to a child and find a plaster with both hands free. Keep one torch per person, a stash of the right batteries, and a rechargeable power bank that lives permanently topped up in the same drawer. Warmth is the third pillar, and in a cold snap it is the serious one — blankets, wool layers, hats indoors, and the habit of closing off one room and letting everyone gather in it. Bodies and closed doors heat a small space surprisingly well.
One firm safety line: nothing that burns fuel comes indoors. No barbecues, no camping stoves in the kitchen, no generators in a garage or on a covered balcony. Carbon monoxide is the actual danger in outage stories, not hunger.
The food plan that isn't a bunker
You do not need shelves of tins with a five-year horizon. You need two or three days of food that requires no cooking and no cold storage: crackers, nut butter, tinned fish, oat biscuits, dried fruit, long-life milk, instant coffee for the adults, and something genuinely nice — chocolate, or the good crisps. Morale is a supply category.
For the fridge and freezer, the rule is simple and worth remembering: keep the doors shut. A full freezer holds its cold far longer than a half-empty one, so if you have space, freeze bottles of water and let them sit there as ballast. Eat from the fridge first, the freezer second, the cupboard last. Anything that has been properly warm for hours — meat, fish, cooked rice, dairy — goes in the bin, and I have learned not to negotiate with myself about it at midnight.
Information, money and the people on your landing
Print or write down what your phone normally holds: your energy provider's outage number, your building manager, two neighbours, a relative outside the area. A cheap battery radio is old-fashioned and brilliant, because it works when the mobile network is congested. Keep some cash in small notes, since card machines are electricity too.
Then do the part that actually matters most. Knock on the doors on your landing before anything happens, and find out who is elderly, who lives alone, who relies on a device that plugs into the wall. In every outage I have lived through, the thing that made it bearable was not my torch collection. It was the neighbour with a gas hob who made tea for the whole floor.
How do you keep an outage from frightening the children?
Children take their reading of the situation almost entirely from your face and your voice, so the framing you use in the first ten minutes tends to stick. Announce it as an event rather than a problem — torches on, duvets to the sofa, dinner is picnic food, and everyone gets to stay up late in the dark — and keep your own worried logistics conversations for another room. It also helps enormously to let them have a job: holding the torch, counting the candles you are not going to light, checking on a neighbour with you.
How long should I actually plan for?
Three days is the sensible planning horizon for most households, because it covers the overwhelming majority of weather-related outages and it is achievable without turning a spare room into a store. If you want to go further, extend the water and the medication supply rather than the tinned food, since those are the two things you cannot borrow from a neighbour. And if anyone in your home depends on refrigerated medication or powered medical equipment, talk to your pharmacist or care team now about their specific contingency advice — that is the one part of this you should not improvise from an article.
