Almost every preparedness guide out there was written by somebody with a garage.
Store fifty gallons of water. Keep a generator fueled. Put a chest freezer in the shop. That's fine advice if you have a shop to put it in. If you live in an apartment, a condo, or a rental where the storage is one hall closet, that advice isn't just unhelpful — it makes people quit before they start. They read the list, look around the room, and decide readiness isn't for them.
It is. It just looks different. And I'd argue apartment prep matters more than the house version, because of what I've watched happen in these buildings after the power goes out.
Let me be straight with you about that part first, because it changes what you'd pack.
What actually happens in an apartment building after a storm
A house that loses power is a house that loses power. An apartment building that loses power becomes a different environment entirely, and it degrades in a specific order.
The building stops working before your unit does. Elevators go down. The pumps that push water to the upper floors go down with them — a lot of buildings can't get water above the third or fourth story without electricity. Interior hallways have no windows, so they go fully dark, day and night. None of this is something you can fix. You can't repair the building's pump. You can't tarp the building's roof. In a house you have options. In an apartment you have neighbors and a landlord's phone number that isn't being answered.
First-floor units flood, and the water sits. People picture flooding as a wave that comes and goes. Often it doesn't. It comes in, and then it stays for days, because there's nowhere for it to drain and no power to pump it out. That standing water is where the real problem starts, and I'll come back to it.
You can't control anyone else's decisions. This is the piece that separates multi-family from everything else. Your preparation protects your household. It does not protect you from what the unit above you does, or what somebody two doors down decides to do to stay warm. In a building, other people's choices become your emergency.
Then the timeline turns social. Once the grocery stores are closed and the gas stations are down, and it's four days into post-storm heat with no power, you're not dealing with a supply problem anymore. You're dealing with a lot of desperate, exhausted, frightened people in a confined space with nothing to do and no information. Displaced folks end up sheltering with strangers. Tempers get short. It becomes a flash point, and it happens faster than most people believe it will.
I'm not telling you that to frighten anybody. I'm telling you because it leads to the single most useful decision in this entire post, and it's the one thing that makes apartment prep simple:
Build to shelter in place for 72 hours, and to walk out the door with your kit in one hand.
That's it. That's the whole design. Not a two-week bunker — a bridge that holds while conditions are still fine, and a bag that leaves with you before they aren't. The people who do worst in these situations are almost never the ones who left early. They're the ones who waited to see whether it would get better.
And conveniently, a kit you can carry is by definition a kit that fits in a closet. Your space problem and your safety problem have the same answer.
Carbon monoxide — the one that kills people who survived the storm
I want to be direct here because this is the one I've seen the worst outcomes from, and it is almost entirely preventable.
Never run a generator, a charcoal grill, a camp stove, or a propane heater inside an apartment, on a balcony, in a breezeway, or in a parking garage.
A balcony feels like outside. It isn't. It's a partially enclosed space attached to your living space, usually with a sliding door that's open because the AC is out, and the exhaust comes right back in. I have seen people put a generator on a balcony specifically because they knew not to put it in the living room, and it killed them anyway.
And it doesn't stay in the unit that caused it. A generator running on an upstairs balcony can flood the units below it with carbon monoxide. CO doesn't rise and blow off like smoke — it mixes with the air and goes wherever the air goes: down over the balcony edge, through the sliding door somebody left open for the breeze, through shared walls, vents, and chases. The people it reaches did nothing wrong. They didn't buy a generator and they never got a vote.
That's what I mean about other people's decisions becoming your emergency. It's also the best argument I can make for a battery CO alarm even if you'd never run an engine anywhere near your own home. Your neighbor's judgment is part of your risk now. I don't sell CO alarms — any hardware store has them for about twenty dollars. Get one that runs on its own battery, because your hardwired one is dead the moment the power is.
And this isn't only a summer problem. In an abnormal cold snap, people bring small barbecue pits inside to heat the unit. Same outcome, different season. Every unusual winter produces these calls.
Carbon monoxide is invisible, it has no smell, and it kills whole families in their sleep — typically a day or two after the storm passed, when everybody has decided the danger is over. That's the cruel part of it. They made it through the event and died during the cleanup.
For an apartment, the answer is never combustion. It's batteries and light:
- A rugged solar power bank, because your phone is your flashlight, your radio, and your contact with your people until the battery dies. It's an anchor piece in the Covenant 72-Hour Hurricane Kit for exactly that reason.
- A headlamp per person, not one shared flashlight. Windowless stairwells are genuinely dark, and hands-free matters when you're carrying a kid down six flights.
- Battery lanterns instead of candles. In a building where your neighbor's fire becomes yours through a shared wall, I'd rather you sit in the dark.
- A battery CO alarm, if you don't already have one with a working battery.
Keep a reliable fire-starting tool in your go-bag anyway — not for indoor use, but because if you end up somewhere without power, warmth becomes a real problem fast.
Sanitation — the overlooked one that puts people in the hospital
This is the part almost nobody preps for, and after a few days it's the thing actually making people sick.
When the water stops and the toilets stop, an apartment building goes unsanitary fast — and if the first floor took on water that hasn't receded, you now have standing water carrying sewage, fuel, and whatever else came in with it. Bacteria doesn't care that the storm is over. Cuts and scrapes that would be nothing on a normal Tuesday get infected in that environment, and they get infected quickly. Add heat, add no running water to wash with, add people wading through it to get in and out of the building, and you get infections that turn serious before anyone thinks to take them seriously.
The gear for this is cheap, small, and constantly skipped:
- Hand sanitizer and a large pack of wipes. When there's no running water, wipes do about nine different jobs.
- Nitrile gloves. For cleanup, for handling anything that's been in the water, for basic first aid.
- Heavy trash bags — waste containment is a real job when the toilets don't flush, and it's the difference between a bad week and a sick household.
- Wound care that actually treats contamination: irrigation, antiseptic, and clean dry dressings you can change often. A basic family first aid kit covers the everyday injuries, but restock the wound-care side heavier than the box comes with.
- Boots or closed shoes you don't mind losing. Never wade in flip-flops. A cut on the bottom of a foot in dirty standing water is how a survivable week becomes a hospital stay.
A straight answer, since I sell kits: my 72-Hour Kit does not include the sanitation items. It covers water, shelter, fire, light and power, first aid, and the pack to carry it. Gloves, wipes, and heavy trash bags cost a few dollars at any grocery store, and I'd rather tell you to grab them there than sell you a marked-up version. Add them to whatever kit you own — mine or anybody else's.
And the rule that matters most: if you take a cut in floodwater, clean it immediately and watch it. Redness spreading, heat, streaking, or a fever means you need care and you shouldn't wait for the roads to clear to decide that. In a normal week that's a minor injury. In these conditions it isn't.
Water, when you don't have a garage floor to give up
One gallon per person per day. Seventy-two hours is the floor, not the goal. A family of four needs 12 gallons minimum, and that's real space — I won't pretend otherwise.
Two things make it work in a small place.
Store flat, fill late. Collapsible water bladders fold to almost nothing on a closet shelf and stay there until a storm is actually on the forecast. Then you fill them from the tap while municipal water is still clean and pressurized. Fifteen minutes of filling, weeks of reserve, and you get your closet back the rest of the year. For most apartments that's the best trade available.
Carry the ability to make water, not just store it. A compact hollow-fiber filter weighs a few ounces and lets you use what you can reach. Storing and purifying are two different jobs, and small spaces need both because you'll never store as much as a house can.
Two free things to do tonight: find your building's water shutoff, and know that the tank on your water heater is thirty to fifty gallons of drinkable water already sitting in your unit. Most people have no idea it's there.
One more, specific to apartments: keep your kit up off the floor. If you're on a ground-floor unit, everything at floor level is gone in the first hour and stays gone for days. Shelf height, minimum.
Know your stairwell before you need it
Walk your building once, on a clear day, and answer four questions:
- Where are the two nearest stairwells? (Two. The closest one may be exactly where the problem is.)
- Can you get down them carrying your kit, and a child or a pet if that applies?
- Where does your family meet if you're separated and phones don't work?
- Who on your floor is elderly, disabled, or alone?
That last one isn't charity, it's strategy. In a building, your neighbors are your actual first response — they're closer than any ambulance, and after a bad storm the roads may be cut anyway. They're also the difference between a hallway full of strangers and a hallway full of people who know each other's names when things get tense. Knowing three doors on your floor is worth more than any single item you can buy.
A communications plan costs nothing. Decide now who checks in, when, and where you meet — because in a bad storm the towers often go down.
First aid, scaled to a closet
Two different things, and they're not interchangeable.
An everyday family first aid kit handles what actually happens most — cuts, burns, blisters, the fall on a dark staircase. Keep it somewhere you can find it without lights.
Separately: serious bleeding kills in minutes, faster than help can reach you when the elevators are dead and the roads are cut. That calls for real trauma gear with genuine, life-critical components, and knowing how to use it. I only point people to real trauma kits, because a counterfeit tourniquet on a job where being wrong is fatal isn't a bargain — it's a liability with a price tag.
If you would rather not assemble it piece by piece, the Apartment Emergency Kit is exactly the shelf described above — the 30-gallon bladder you fill late, a hollow-fiber filter, two headlamps so nobody follows anybody around in the dark, and a solar power bank. No CO alarm and no sanitation supplies in it, for the reasons given above: buy those cheaper elsewhere.
One shelf is genuinely enough
Here's what apartment readiness looks like when it's done:
- One closet shelf: folded bladders, filter, first aid, sanitation, batteries, lights.
- One bag by the door: 72 hours of essentials, packed, that you could pick up and be out with in under a minute.
- One conversation with your household about where you meet.
- One walk down the stairwell so your feet already know the route.
- One decision made in advance: the conditions under which you leave — and leaving early rather than late.
That's the whole thing. It isn't a bunker and it was never meant to be.
If you'd rather not assemble it piece by piece, the Covenant 72-Hour Hurricane Kit is built to be that bag — water filtration, fire, shelter, power, first aid, and the pack to carry it, in one grab that lives in a closet and leaves when you do. Every item had to clear the same bar: would I stake my own family on it? If the answer was no, it didn't make the cut.
And if you want to walk your own place room by room first, the free 72-Hour Family Checklist is the same framework I use. It works the same in 700 square feet as it does in a house.
Small space was never the obstacle. Waiting is.
Stand Ready. Stay Unbreakable.
— Reuben
Founder, Covenant Prep Co. | U.S. Marine Veteran · Firefighter/EMT