Most people who build an emergency kit get the obvious parts right: water, food, a flashlight, a first aid kit. Those are the essentials for a reason, and if you’ve already covered them — including everything in our full 72-hour emergency kit checklist — you’re in genuinely good shape.
This isn’t that list. These are five smaller items that don’t make the “essentials” cut but that people consistently realize they’re missing only once they actually need the kit — often at an inconvenient moment, when there’s no easy way to run out and grab what’s missing.
1. Sanitation Supplies
Water and food get all the attention, but what happens after you eat and drink doesn’t. If water service is disrupted, toilets may not flush reliably, and that’s a problem that gets worse — not better — the longer it goes unaddressed. A few heavy-duty garbage bags (doubled, for strength), some hand sanitizer, and a roll of toilet paper solve a problem most checklists skip entirely.
Practical tip: a small dedicated pouch or bag just for these items, separate from your food and first aid supplies, makes it obvious at a glance that you’ve actually covered this — rather than assuming a stray roll of toilet paper somewhere in the apartment counts.
2. Something to Actually Eat With
Canned goods are a checklist staple, and a manual can opener usually makes the list too. What often doesn’t: an actual way to eat the food once it’s open. A couple of sturdy backpacking sporks or reusable utensils take up almost no space and solve a genuinely annoying gap — the kind of small thing that’s easy to laugh about later, but genuinely irritating at 9pm with a cold can of beans and nothing to eat it with.
Practical tip: metal or hard plastic outlasts flimsy disposable cutlery, which tends to snap under any real use. One set per household member is plenty — this isn’t an item that needs duplicating in bulk.
3. A Paper Map and a Written Contact Card
Phones die, and cell networks can get overloaded or go down entirely during a widespread disruption — exactly when you’d most want to reach someone or find an alternate route. A basic paper map of your area and a small card with a few important phone numbers written down (an out-of-town contact, each family member’s number, your building or family meeting point) cost nothing and don’t depend on a battery, a signal, or your phone surviving the situation at all.
Practical tip: write the card by hand and laminate it, or slip it into a zip-top bag — ink can smudge, and this is one item where “technically in the kit” and “actually still readable” aren’t the same thing.
4. Spare Keys
If you leave in a hurry, house keys and car keys are easy to grab — until they’re not, because they’re on a hook by a door you can’t get back to, or a family member left without them. A spare set stored with the kit means one less thing to search for under stress, and it removes a single point of failure (one missing keyring) from an already stressful moment.
Practical tip: label spare keys clearly but not with your home address, for basic security if the kit is ever lost or the bag is grabbed by someone other than you.
5. One Genuinely Multi-Use Item
A simple cotton bandana or a large piece of sturdy cloth is easy to overlook because it doesn’t look like “emergency gear.” But it can double as a bandage, a dust or smoke filter, a way to carry or bundle small items, or a signal if you tie it around something bright and visible. It’s the single most flexible item in this list relative to how little space it takes up.
Practical tip: two is better than one — keep one in the main kit and consider a second in a grab-and-go bag if you have one, since it’s cheap enough that duplicating it isn’t wasteful the way duplicating water or food would be.
Why These Get Missed
None of these five are expensive or hard to find — they’re missed because they don’t show up on the standard “big four” advice (water, food, light, first aid) that most checklists lead with. They’re the details that turn a kit from “technically complete” into one that actually holds up for three real days.
If you’ve already built the basics from our main 72-hour kit checklist or the apartment-specific version, these five are worth a quick pass over your existing kit rather than a reason to start over.
If you’d rather work from a printed, done-for-you checklist that already includes items like these, the free 72-Hour Family Guide covers the full staged approach in one place.
A Quick Way to Check Your Existing Kit
If you’ve already got a kit built, this doesn’t need to turn into a full re-check of everything. A five-minute pass is enough:
- Open the kit and physically look for each of the five items above — don’t rely on memory.
- Anything missing, add it to a shopping list rather than trying to solve it in one trip.
- While you’re in there, glance at expiry dates on food and check that batteries haven’t
corroded — a natural moment to combine this check with the twice-a-year maintenance habit covered in the main checklist.
This kind of small, periodic check is what keeps a kit useful rather than just complete on paper — built once, verified occasionally, and actually ready when it matters.
FAQ
Do I need all five of these, or are some more important than others? Sanitation supplies and the paper map/contact card matter most — both solve problems that get significantly worse the longer a disruption lasts. The others are smaller but still worth the minimal space they take.
I already have a first aid kit — isn’t a bandana redundant? Not quite. A bandana’s value is its flexibility (filtering, carrying, signaling, improvising) in situations your first aid kit’s purpose-built bandages don’t cover as well.
Should I add these to an existing kit or rebuild from scratch? Add them. None of these five require rebuilding anything — they’re small additions to a kit you’ve likely already got most of the way there.
Is there a sixth or seventh thing worth adding beyond this list? This list is deliberately short and non-overlapping with our main checklist rather than exhaustive. If your household has specific needs (infants, pets, medical equipment), those are worth their own pass beyond any general list.
How often should I re-check that these five items are still in the kit? The same twice-a-year rhythm as the rest of your kit works well — spring and autumn are easy to remember and line up naturally with the main checklist’s own maintenance schedule.
Internal Link Notes
Second half only: one mention of the 72-Hour Family Guide, after the “Why These Get Missed” section. Links up to `/preparedness/` (in the lead-magnet paragraph) and sideways to both other Kit Building siblings early in the piece, completing the cluster’s cross-linking (all 3 Preparedness Kit Building articles now link to each other).