When the Outage Is Measured in Weeks: The Pet Plan Your Gear Cannot Carry

No backup gear covers an outage that runs for weeks. Treat everything you own as a bridge to moving the animal, and decide when to move it from three things you can observe: the published runtime of your gear, your utility’s restoration estimate and how it changes, and the animal’s own signs. Before an outage, confirm by phone whether any public center in your area admits animals.

There is a point in a long outage where the preparedness advice runs out. The battery air pump has switched itself on, the heat pack is on hour thirty, the freezer has stayed shut, and the fuel can is empty. The utility’s estimate has moved twice, both times the wrong way. Published instructions exist for what to do next, but none is scaled to how long the outage will run.

This is a narrow page. Our power outage hub covers the unannounced outage of hours to a few days. It treats the weeks-scale outage as a different planning tier and leaves the decision to relocate the animal to the reader. This page makes that call, using two pieces of arithmetic found on no other page here. It sends everything else to the page that owns it: the cold chain, fuel rules, thermal thresholds and improvisation hazards.

What the Federal Record Shows

Preparedness writing describes long outages in adjectives. The public record uses counts and dates.

Hurricane Ida: three weeks in one document series

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) published situation reports through Ida’s restoration. DOE’s final report says Ida made landfall near Port Fourchon, Louisiana on August 29 as a category 4 storm. The counts that follow come from DOE’s reports:

• September 9, 2021 (Update #12): approximately 299,000 outages remaining in Louisiana due to Ida.
• September 17, 2021 (Update #18): approximately 65,000 outages in the Gulf Coast, including 23,000 in Texas due to Nicholas and 42,000 in Louisiana due to both storms. The report says the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas were mainly restored, but “some harder hit rural locations are days to weeks away from full restorations.”
• September 23, 2021 (Update #20, final): approximately 16,000 outages remaining in Louisiana due to Ida.

Counting from DOE’s landfall date to DOE’s final report date gives 25 days. That subtraction is ours; DOE publishes the two dates, not an elapsed figure. Twenty-five days is the number every runtime later on this page has to be compared against.

The final report gives the reason for the tail: “Utilities have encountered extensive damage that will require rebuilding the system.” Rebuilding is not repairing. The report adds that damage to customer-owned equipment must be repaired by a qualified electrician before utilities can restore power, so some households are not in the utility’s queue until an electrician has been to them.

Hurricane Maria: a tail that ran to months

DOE’s final Puerto Rico event summary, dated April 4, 2018, reports that on April 3 the utility (PREPA) said 95.80% of customers (1,411,086) had been restored, leaving 4.20% (61,914) without power.

For the other end of that measurement, use the date Maria arrived. DOE’s report header lists an incident start date of August 25, 2017, which covers the Irma and Maria period and is not the date Maria struck Puerto Rico. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) gives it: Maria struck on September 20, 2017, later in the month after Irma passed near the island in early September, when about two-thirds of the island’s 1.5 million customers lost power. EIA says Maria left 80% of the transmission and distribution network inoperable and nearly all customers without power.

September 20, 2017 to April 3, 2018 is 195 days. That subtraction is ours, on two dates from two federal agencies. Roughly 62,000 customers were still without power more than six months after the storm. EIA’s summary says about 96% of customers had power restored as of April 2018, but net electricity generation stayed relatively low for several more months.

The ordinary baseline, and the trap inside averages

EIA reports that, even without major events such as hurricanes, customers in Puerto Rico averaged 27 hours of grid interruptions per year between 2021 and 2024, against about two hours a year for the mainland United States. On average in 2024, Puerto Rico customers went without electricity for more than 73 hours, of which 43 hours were attributed to major events. In 2022, Hurricane Fiona left all 1.5 million customers without power, and the average customer had almost 200 hours of interruptions that year.

EIA defines the metric behind these figures (SAIDI) as the total duration an average customer experiences non-momentary interruptions in a one-year period. An average across a whole territory for a whole year is not a duration any household lived through. Almost 200 hours is consistent with some customers restored in a day and others out for a month. Never read a territory-wide average as the number your own street will get.

Texas in February 2021 is not a weeks-long precedent

Texas in February 2021 is the outage people cite as the worst recent case. It is the wrong reference for this page.

A December 2022 FERC staff presentation records the “Largest firm load shed event in U.S. history (23,418 MW).” It also says that “for over two consecutive days, ERCOT averaged 34,000 megawatts (MW) of generation outages.” That second figure is the window over which generation outages were averaged, not the length of anybody’s blackout.

The November 2021 FERC, NERC and Regional Entity joint staff report gives durations, and they are days. It says ERCOT ordered 20,000 MW of firm load shed and maintained it for nearly three days. Its comparison of four cold-weather events gives an overall duration of firm load shedding of over 70 hours in ERCOT, over 4 hours in SPP and over 2 hours in MISO South, inside an event window of February 8 to 20, 2021. At household level, more than 4.5 million people in Texas lost power, some for as long as four days, while exposed to below-freezing temperatures for over six days.

Four days at a house is a severe outage, and it is not a weeks-long restoration. A plan built for one does not cover the other. Water service in Texas that winter ran on a separate utility with a separate record and is not evidence about how long the power was off. Our grid alert stages and pet power needs guide covers the staged public alerts that grid operators run ahead of an event like this one.

The Ceiling Arithmetic

Across its guides, this site publishes a runtime ceiling for each backup layer it recommends for animal-dependent equipment. Each figure is sourced on the page that publishes it, with that page’s caveats. No page has put them in one column until now. This table adds no figure of its own. It lists layers that run unattended on stored energy, plus one generator’s published run time on one tank of fuel.

Backup layer	Published ceiling	Where the figure is sourced on this site
Refrigerator, door kept closed	About 4 hours	Power outage hub, from federal food-safety guidance
Full freezer, door kept closed	48 hours, or 24 hours if half full	Power outage hub, from federal food-safety guidance
Battery backup aquarium air pump, auto-switching	20 hours continuous, up to 40 hours in power-save mode	Aquariums and reptiles in an outage, manufacturer’s own page
D-cell battery aquarium air pump	72 hours or more depending on batteries, per the manufacturer, against up to 48 hours on the retail listing	Aquariums and reptiles in an outage, manufacturer page and retail listing, which disagree
Larger D-cell aquarium air pump	Up to 150 hours, a retail listing claim the manufacturer does not publish	Aquariums and reptiles in an outage, listing only
Purpose-built reptile heat pack	40 hours, a rating of the pack’s chemistry rather than hours of usable heat in an enclosure	Power outage hub, manufacturer’s own page; see also heat pack runtime
Shipping warmer used as a reptile heat source	20, 30, 40, 60, 72, 96 and 120-hour versions, per the manufacturer, on the same chemistry basis; the 72-hour version is the one profiled on this site	Aquariums and reptiles in an outage, manufacturer’s own page; see also heat pack runtime
Gel-pack medical cooler targeting refrigerator temperature	Up to 36 hours, published with no outside temperature attached	Refrigerated pet medication in an outage, manufacturer’s own page
Evaporative cooling wallet	Minimum 45 hours at a constant 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but holding 64 to 79 degrees Fahrenheit inside, which is not refrigeration	Refrigerated pet medication in an outage, manufacturer’s own page
Alarm base station in its low power mode	Up to 24 hours, with most functions and Wi-Fi disabled	Power outage hub, manufacturer’s support page
One specific portable generator, one tank	20 hours at 25 percent load, 15 hours at 50 percent load, on a 6.6 gallon tank	Generator sizing for pet loads, manufacturer’s manual

The layer not in the table. Our refrigerated pet medication page also profiles a powered portable medical fridge. Its manufacturer specification is refrigerator temperature held indefinitely below 95 degrees Fahrenheit ambient while powered, or roughly 30 hours passively on its gel pack at that ambient. It has a power ceiling, not an hours ceiling, and that ceiling is your battery bank, vehicle, solar panel or generator. The same holds for a portable power station, whose hours are its watt-hours divided by what you plug into it (see generator versus power station). The passive layers end in hours, and the powered layers hand the question to the fuel and recharge problem below.

The longest number in the column is about six days, and it is the one figure its own manufacturer does not publish. The longest manufacturer-published figure is 120 hours. Everything that keeps a medication cold without power is under two days.

The arithmetic

This is our arithmetic on published figures, not a finding any manufacturer or agency states.

DOE’s Ida final report puts approximately 16,000 Louisiana customers still out on day 25, which is 600 hours. The longest single runtime in the table covers about a quarter of that, and only if the retailer’s claim holds, only on fresh cells, and only for oxygen in a fish tank. The longest manufacturer-published figure, 120 hours, covers 20 percent. The refrigerator covers two thirds of one percent. Maria’s tail is worse by an order of magnitude: roughly 62,000 customers on day 195 is 4,680 hours.

There is no gear answer at this tier, and buying a larger version of the same thing does not change that. Every product this site recommends for an outage is a bridge. At a weeks-long restoration, the bridge tells you how long you have to arrange the animal’s departure, not whether you have to.

Why the column is optimistic

• The ceilings are not additive. A 40-hour heat pack and a 36-hour cooler do not combine into 76 hours of anything. They solve separate problems, and your outage runs all of them at once. Your household’s ceiling is the shortest figure among the layers your animals depend on.
• Several are stated without the conditions that decide them. The 36-hour cooler figure has no outside temperature attached. The generator figure is at 25 percent load, which your equipment list probably does not match.
• Two are ratings of a chemical reaction, not hours of usable warmth. Our heat pack runtime page covers this. The manufacturer’s account is that a pack set out in a large open space may not warm up properly, and sellers that publish a low-temperature limit put it at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, below which the water inside can freeze and the pack may stop working. A multi-day winter outage in an unheated house is that condition, so treat both rows as upper bounds.
• Every layer that can be extended depends on the thing that is broken. A battery recharges from the grid or from a solar panel with its own weather. A generator refuels from a pump, and the pump is electric.

Fuel: Why the Refuelable Layer Is Not Unlimited

Our generator sizing page owns fuel runway, refueling procedure and storage. This page adds the supply side over weeks.

Ready.gov lists among an outage’s effects that it may “Close retail businesses, grocery stores, gas stations, ATMs, banks and other services.” It also frames extended outages as something that may affect the whole community and the economy. Neither statement is scoped to a duration or mentions an animal.

DOE’s Ida reports show what that looked like:

• September 9, 2021: DOE reported widespread outages, damage, flooding and access constraints leading to retail gas station closures. Stations with power or on generators had long lines and high demand, which led to temporary fuel outages while stations waited for resupply. The state was supplying generators to some retail stations.
• September 17, 2021: DOE said “The retail station supply chain is continuing to stabilize.” It added that “Some stations may still be unavailable due to power outages and/or damage.”
• April 4, 2018, Puerto Rico: DOE’s summary says 970 of 1,100 retail gas stations were operational. That leaves roughly one station in eight not operating more than six months after the storm. The fraction is ours; DOE does not say why any station was down.

Florida’s statute shows how fragile the pumps are

Florida Statutes section 526.143 exists because fuel pumps are electric. It is Florida law only, and a skim of it produces the wrong conclusion. In summary:

• Retail outlets newly built or substantially renovated, with a certificate of occupancy issued on or after July 1, 2006, must be prewired with a transfer switch and capable of running pumps, dispensing equipment, life-safety systems and payment equipment on an alternate power source (subsection 2).
• Outlets within one-half mile of an interstate or a designated evacuation route must meet the same standard if they have 16 or more fueling positions in counties of 300,000 or more, 12 or more in counties of 100,000 to under 300,000, or eight or more in counties under 100,000. This has no construction-date condition (subsection 3(a)). Some operators are exempt, including fleet operators and outlets supplied by a public hospital’s onsite generation (subsection 4(b)).
• The generator requirement is one portable generator per 10 outlets for an owner with 10 or more outlets in a county, stored in Florida or within 250 miles, and available within 24 hours after a disaster (subsection 5). The department may waive it on written request when the generators are used for an emergency in another state.
• Fuel terminals and wholesalers must be able to run their loading racks on alternate power for a minimum of 72 hours, with that power available no later than 36 hours after a major disaster. That floor sits at the terminal that loads the trucks, not at the pump your car is parked at.

The statute requires prewiring and capability at the outlets it covers, not a generator on site. Do not read it as a promise that Florida stations can pump. Read it as a legislature concluding that a fueling network on grid power is fragile enough to legislate about. Planning a weeks-long animal-care strategy around driving to a pump is planning around a thin margin.

The American Red Cross gives the preparation step: “Keep your car gas tank at least half full.” A half tank on day one is a departure option. A half tank you meant to top up is a queue.

Where Federal Guidance Sends You, and Whether It Holds for Weeks

This is the more important half of the page. Every relocation instruction points at the same kind of place, and none says how long you can stay.

What the sources say

• Ready.gov: “Go to a community location with power if heat or cold is extreme.” Its preparation section says to check with local officials about heating and cooling locations open near you.
• The American Red Cross: “Evacuate if your home is too hot or too cold, or if you have medical devices that need power.” It adds that communities often provide warming or cooling centers and power charging stations. Its preparation guidance says to plan how and when you will evacuate, and to plan to go somewhere with heat or air conditioning if the weather is very hot or very cold.
• FEMA, in its Stay Safe and Warm Toolkit dated January 26, 2026: sample messaging for communities to republish, scoped to cold weather. One bullet says to go to a community warming center if you cannot keep your house warm, and to visit your community’s emergency management website or call 211. The next bullet is the one almost nothing else in the federal literature says. It reads “Community warming centers may not allow pets.” It adds: call to ask before leaving home with your pets, and ask your local humane society for more information.

What the sources do not cover

• None is scaled to duration. Each is triggered by a condition in the house: extreme heat or cold, or a medical device without power. None says how long an outage must be expected to run before you go, or how long the destination is good for.
• The Red Cross trigger is about the household, not an animal. The page has two pet items in a preparation list: a household evacuation plan that includes pets, and a pet emergency kit. Neither is joined to the evacuate sentence. The medical devices in the trigger are people’s.
• Ready.gov’s instruction says nothing about animals. Whether the community location it names admits one is not addressed.

What this site concludes

This conclusion is ours. Our cooling and warming centers page documents from state guidance that a facility of this kind may be a daytime gathering place, not an overnight emergency shelter. Put that beside FEMA’s caveat. The destination federal guidance names for an outage may close at night and may refuse your animal. That serves an afternoon in a heat wave or an evening in a cold snap. It is not an answer for a three-week restoration. No source joins those two facts in one sentence, which is why this page does.

Two practical consequences follow, and they are also ours, not a published protocol:

• The pet question at a public facility is a phone call, not a door decision. If the answer is no, you need the next destination before you have driven somewhere with an animal in the car. The cooling and warming centers page covers what state guidance says about pets there and how to ask about a specific building.
• If a public facility is not durable, the private list is the plan. A relative or friend outside the outage footprint, a boarding facility, a pet-friendly hotel booking. What to do when your county has no pet-friendly shelter builds that ladder, and do pet-friendly disaster shelters exist explains the co-located model where it exists. The calls they describe are ones you cannot make well on day nine.

Every Published Trigger Is Condition-Scoped, Not Duration-Scoped

The shape of the published record is itself the finding. Where a source does not address something, the cell says so.

Source	Trigger it publishes	Duration attached	Animal named in the trigger
Ready.gov, Power Outages	Go to a community location with power if heat or cold is extreme	Not addressed	Not addressed
American Red Cross, Power Outage Safety	Evacuate if the home is too hot or too cold, or medical devices need power	Not addressed	Not in this sentence; the page’s two pet items sit in a separate preparation list
FEMA, Stay Safe and Warm Toolkit (Jan 26, 2026)	Go to a community warming center if you cannot keep your house warm	Not addressed	Not in the trigger, but the adjacent bullet says warming centers may not allow pets
This site, aquarium and reptile outage page	Species-specific room-temperature thresholds plus symptom overrides and a gear-exhaustion trigger	Framed against your gear’s published runtime rather than a fixed number of days	Yes, by species
This site, indoor temperature decay page	Measure your own building’s rate of change and act on direction and speed	States plainly that no hours-to-danger figure for pets was located	Yes

The claim here is narrow. None of the sources cited here publishes a relocation trigger scaled to how long the outage will last. Three sources do publish triggers, and they are keyed to conditions you can observe rather than a duration you would have to predict. That is arguably the right design, since a rule built on a prediction rests on the least reliable input available. What condition-based triggers do not do is help a household decide, on day four, whether to start arrangements that take days to complete. The next section is for that gap, and everything in it is ours.

A Decision Aid Built From What You Can Observe

This section is our own reasoning, not a published protocol. It does not tell you to leave at any particular hour. It does not override your veterinarian, an official evacuation order for an underlying hazard, or the species-specific thresholds on the aquarium and reptile page. If any of those says go, go.

Observation one: your actual ceiling. Walk the house and write down, for each animal-dependent load, the published runtime of the specific device you own, from its own manual or manufacturer page. Your household’s ceiling is the shortest of them, because that is what fails first. Do it on paper before an outage.

Observation two: what your utility says, and how it changes. An estimated restoration time is a forecast, and its movement carries more information than its value. An estimate that keeps sliding, or is replaced by language about rebuilding rather than repairing, is a different signal from one that holds. DOE reported that shift for Ida. On September 17 it said “some harder hit rural locations are days to weeks away from full restorations.” Six days later its final report said utilities faced damage that will require rebuilding the system. If your utility starts using that vocabulary about your area, you are in the tier this page is about.

Observation three: the gap. Subtract your ceiling from the utility’s estimate. If the estimate is longer than your ceiling, you have a countdown, not a powering-through plan, and the countdown is for arranging a destination. The subtraction is deliberately crude, because a precise-looking formula here would be a fabricated one.

Observation four: the animal. Symptoms override every calculation on this page. The indoor temperature decay page carries what veterinary and agency sources publish about signs to act on, and notes that no hours-to-danger figure for pets was found. The power outage hub carries the heatstroke signs that mean emergency care now. If an animal is showing signs, the destination is a veterinarian, not a community facility and not another hour of insulation.

Why decide early. Everything that makes leaving possible degrades over the same days the house does. Fuel gets harder, as the DOE reports show. Roads can be the constraint rather than the car, which the re-entry access page documents for closures that ran for weeks. Boarding capacity fills. A friend on grid power in week one may be hosting three other households by week two. Deciding early and being wrong costs an unnecessary trip. Deciding late and being wrong costs the options.

Refrigerated Medication Is a Resupply Problem at This Tier

The refrigerated pet medication page owns the cold chain: what the veterinary insulin labels require, the packout method, and why it publishes no hour count for how long a pet’s medication stays usable once the cold goes. This page does not restate those, and publishes no hour count either.

What this page adds is the tier. Nothing in the ceiling table holds refrigerator temperature for weeks on stored energy alone, and the one powered unit that does holds it only as long as you can keep powering it. Preservation is not the problem. Supply is.

Two published instructions point the same way, and both are written about people. Ready.gov says: “If the power is out for more than a day, discard any medication that should be refrigerated, unless the drug’s label says otherwise.” It follows with advice to consult your doctor or pharmacist immediately for a new supply. That sentence assumes a household that can still reach a pharmacy. This page will not extend it to a pet’s medication in either direction, because at this tier the replacement half may not be available for weeks. Do not discard an animal’s refrigerated medication on the strength of a human instruction. That is a call for your veterinarian, made before the supply is gone.

FDA’s emergency guidance about human insulin ends in the same place: vials exposed to extreme conditions “should be discarded and replaced as soon as possible” once properly stored insulin is available again. The same document publishes a figure many outage articles reach for: human insulin supplied by the manufacturers may be left unrefrigerated between 59°F and 86°F for up to 28 days and continue to work. That is human insulin, on a page FDA addressed to patients and their healthcare providers, and it refers questions about a particular vial to those providers and the manufacturers. This page will not hand that figure to you as an answer for an animal.

The label in your house may not be a veterinary one

The two insulins FDA has approved for animals, Vetsulin and ProZinc, require continuous refrigeration and publish no owner-facing hour count, as the refrigerated pet medication page documents from the labels. Not every diabetic pet is on one of those two.

Table 7.1 of the 2026 AAHA Diabetes Management Guidelines for Cats, headed “Insulin Products for Cats,” has a column headed Veterinary FDA Approval Status. Vetsulin and ProZinc are marked Approved. Lantus, Basaglar, Semglee, Rezvoglar, Tresiba, Toujeo and an unbranded glargine are marked Not approved. For a cat prescribed one of those, the carton in the house is a human product with no veterinary FDA approval to read instead. The table states its own scope: “This document is intended as a guideline only, not an AAHA standard of care.”

None of that turns FDA’s 28 days into an outage answer for an animal. The reason for the refusal is who FDA wrote that page for: human patients and their healthcare providers. This site has no veterinary reviewer to extend it to an animal. Our page on what each insulin label says sets both veterinary labels beside ten human ones. Which document covers your animal, and what a weeks-long outage does to it, is for the veterinarian who wrote the prescription.

The weeks-tier action is a set of phone calls, made early:

• Ask your veterinarian what your specific medication tolerates and what an early refill would take. The emergency and early prescription refills page covers who has that authority and why day counts are state law, not one national rule.
• Ask your veterinarian what happens if the practice itself has no power, and whether it has a partner practice outside your area.
• Ask your pharmacy how it dispenses refrigerated products when its own refrigeration is down, and whether it can transfer a prescription to a location outside the outage footprint.
• Ready.gov’s own preparation advice is to talk to your medical provider in advance about a power outage plan for refrigerated medicines and to find out how long medication can be stored at higher temperatures. That advice is about people. The pet version is the same call to a different clinician, and we are making that extension explicitly, not attributing it to Ready.gov.

What This Page Does Not Own

A weeks-long outage touches every problem this site covers. Each page below carries more detail and more caveats than a summary here could.

• The days-scale outage and the four clocks. The power outage hub defines which situation you are in, covers the four household dependencies that need backup power, and carries the carbon monoxide rules, which do not relax because an outage is long.
• Species thresholds and how fast your house changes. Indoor temperature decay and species thresholds covers what the record contains about temperature and animals, and how to measure your building’s rate of change. This page publishes no competing threshold.
• Tanks and enclosures, including when to move the animal. The aquarium and reptile outage page publishes species-specific relocation triggers and rules for using a running vehicle as a bridge.
• Fuel runway, refueling and generator sizing. Generator sizing for pet loads.
• The two-week household reserve. Long-term pet food and water storage builds the shelter-in-place reserve. A reserve built to a two-week standard ends inside the events documented above.
• Improvisations that arrive at hour twelve. Outage improvisations that endanger pets covers unvented heaters, candles and dry ice, and generators and carbon monoxide covers the CO rules. A long outage produces these decisions by attrition, so read them before you are tired and cold.
• Getting back to an animal you are separated from. The re-entry access page covers closures that ran for weeks and how escorted access works.
• The stay-or-go decision for the underlying hazard. Shelter in place or evacuate. If an official order exists for the underlying hazard, that order governs, not this page.

Your Weeks-Long Outage Checklist

Most of this is done on a quiet afternoon. The items marked for during the outage are short on purpose.

• Write down the published runtime of every backup device you own, from its own manual or manufacturer page, and circle the shortest. That is your household’s real ceiling.
• For each ceiling, note what it assumes: an outside temperature, a load percentage, a fresh set of batteries, a full tank. A ceiling published without conditions cannot be planned against.
• Call your veterinarian now about any refrigerated medication, about an early refill, and about what happens if the practice itself loses power. Do not plan to preserve a weeks’ supply; plan to replace it.
• Ask your pharmacy how it handles refrigerated prescriptions during its own outage, and whether a prescription can be transferred outside your area.
• Call, in advance, every public facility your county would open, and ask whether animals are admitted, which species, and whether the site operates overnight. Write the answers next to the phone numbers.
• Build the private destination list anyway: a relative or friend outside the likely outage footprint, a boarding facility, a pet-friendly hotel that takes your species and size.
• Keep the car’s tank at least half full, as the American Red Cross instructs, so a departure is a decision rather than a queue.
• Find out how your utility publishes restoration estimates and sign up for whatever notification it offers, so a change in its language reaches you.
• Read the improvisation and carbon monoxide pages linked above before an outage, not during one.
• Agree in advance, with everyone in the household, on what would make you leave. A trigger set in daylight is easier to act on than one negotiated at hour ninety.
• During an outage: re-check the utility’s estimate against your ceiling every time the estimate moves, and treat the gap as the size of the arranging you still have to do.
• During an outage: if an animal is showing signs, stop working the plan and get to a veterinarian. Symptoms override every number on this page.
• During an outage: if the estimate crosses your ceiling, start making arrangements that day rather than at the ceiling. Arrangements take days.

What a Household Gets Right Here

The work at this tier is not equipment work. It is phone-call work, done in advance, by a person who is not tired.

The gear column above is not useless. It buys the hours during which the phone calls can be made and the drive can be taken. What it is not is a plan for a rebuild, and a household that reads a 40-hour heat pack as a weeks-long answer has misread a manufacturer’s honest number. The federal record says restorations run to weeks and, in the worst case documented here, to months. The manufacturers say hours. Both are accurate. They answer different questions, and the household in the middle has to notice.

Where to Go Next

This page is the weeks-tier spoke of our power outage hub.

• If you do not know which outage you are in: the power outage hub.
• If the question is temperature: indoor temperature decay and species thresholds.
• If the question is the destination: pets at cooling and warming centers and when your county has no pet-friendly shelter.
• If the question is medication: refrigerated pet medication in an outage and emergency and early prescription refills.
• If the question is supplies: long-term pet food and water storage.

Then do the one thing on this page that costs nothing and changes the most. Today, walk the house, and write down the published runtime of every backup device you own next to the phone number of one person outside your area who would take your animals. Those two facts on one piece of paper are the whole plan.