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

There is a point in a long outage where the preparedness advice runs out. You have done the things. The battery air pump switched itself on, the heat pack is on hour thirty, the freezer has been closed since it happened, and the fuel can is empty. The utility’s estimate has moved twice, both times in the same direction. There are published instructions for what you do next, and this page quotes the federal ones, but not one of them is scaled to how long the outage will run.

This page is about the problem that does not end inside your gear’s runtime.

It is a narrow page on purpose. Our power outage hub covers the unannounced outage measured in hours to a few days, and it hands this tier forward by name, stating in its own words that “The weeks-scale outage is a different planning tier, not a longer version of this one” and that the decision at that tier “is whether to relocate the animal instead of powering it through, and this page does not make that call for you.” That handoff is the reason this page exists, and this page makes the call.

It makes it with two pieces of arithmetic that are not on any other page here, and it routes everything else to the page that already owns it. What we are not going to do is re-derive the cold chain, the fuel rules, the thermal thresholds or the improvisation hazards, all of which live in more detail elsewhere on this site than a summary here could carry. Links are in every relevant section, and the last section is a map.

Two Notes Before the Numbers

We are not veterinarians and this site has no veterinary reviewer. Everything below about an animal’s condition points at your own veterinarian, and the one thing this page asks you to do before an outage is have that conversation while a phone call is easy.

We have tested nothing. Every runtime figure below is a number a manufacturer, a retailer or a federal agency published, cited to the page on this site that already sources it, and lined up against durations two federal agencies published. Lining them up is our own arithmetic, and it is labelled as ours everywhere it appears.

What the Federal Record Actually Shows

Preparedness writing tends to describe long outages in adjectives. The public record describes them in counts and dates, and the counts are what make the rest of this page decidable.

Hurricane Ida, tracked across three weeks in one document series

The U.S. Department of Energy published public situation reports through Ida’s restoration, and reading three of them in sequence shows the shape of the thing rather than a single scary number.

Landfall first, from DOE’s own final report: “Hurricane Ida made landfall near Port Fourchon, Louisiana on August 29, as a category 4 storm.”

Update #12, dated Thursday, September 9, 2021: “As of 8:00 AM EDT on September 9, there are approximately 299,000 outages remaining in Louisiana due to Ida.”

Update #18, dated Friday, September 17, 2021: “As of 8:00 AM EDT on September 17, there are approximately 65,000 power outages in the Gulf Coast, including 23,000 outages in Texas due to Nicholas and 42,000 outages in Louisiana due to both storms.” The same report is explicit that the tail is long and uneven: “While the New Orleans and Baton Rouge metro areas are mainly restored following Hurricane Ida, some harder hit rural locations are days to weeks away from full restorations.”

Update #20, the final one, dated Thursday, September 23, 2021: “As of 8:00 AM EDT on September 23, there are approximately 16,000 power outages remaining in Louisiana due to Ida.”

Counting from DOE’s own landfall date to DOE’s own final report date gives 25 days. That subtraction is ours; DOE publishes the two dates and does not publish an elapsed figure. It is worth doing anyway, because 25 days is the number every runtime later on this page has to be compared against.

The reason for the tail is in the same final report, and it is the sentence that separates this tier from every other one: “Utilities have encountered extensive damage that will require rebuilding the system. Damage to customer owned equipment must be repaired by a qualified electrician before utilities are able restore power.”

Rebuilding is not repairing. That second sentence is worth reading twice as well, because it describes a household that is not in the utility’s queue at all until an electrician has been to it, which is a delay stacked on top of the grid’s own.

Hurricane Maria, where the tail ran to months

DOE’s final Puerto Rico event summary, dated April 4, 2018, states: “On April 3, PREPA reported that 95.80% of customers (1,411,086) have been restored, which leaves 4.20% of customers (61,914) remaining without power.”

For the other end of that measurement you need the date Maria arrived, and the trap here is real enough that we are going to name it rather than quietly avoid it. The DOE document just quoted prints, in its own header, the field “INCIDENT START DATE: Friday, August 25, 2017”. That is the start of DOE’s incident period covering both Irma and Maria. It is not the date Maria struck Puerto Rico, and anyone computing an elapsed time from it will publish a wrong figure while quoting a federal document accurately.

The date comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration instead, which writes: “When Hurricane Irma passed near Puerto Rico in early September 2017, about two-thirds of the island’s 1.5 million electric utility customers lost power. Later that same month, on September 20, Hurricane Maria struck.” EIA adds the scale of the damage: “Damage from Hurricane Maria rendered 80% of PREPA’s transmission and distribution network inoperable, causing nearly all electric utility customers to lose power.”

September 20, 2017 to April 3, 2018 is 195 days. That subtraction is ours, on two dates published by two federal agencies, and it means roughly 62,000 customers were still without power more than six months after the storm. EIA’s summary of the same restoration, which EIA itself attributes to DOE situation reports rather than to its own count, is that “about 96% of customers had their power restored as of April 2018, but net electricity generation remained relatively low for several more months.”

Where the ordinary baseline already sits, and the trap inside that number

Puerto Rico is also where the routine, non-storm baseline is documented most clearly, and EIA published an update on it in August 2025: “Even without accounting for electricity interruptions resulting from major events such as hurricanes, customers in Puerto Rico experienced on average 27 hours of power grid interruptions per year between 2021 and 2024. By comparison, electricity customers in the mainland United States generally experience about two hours of electricity interruptions per year without major events.”

Storms add to that. EIA reports that “On average in 2024, customers in Puerto Rico went without electricity for more than 73 hours, of which 43 hours were attributed to major events such as hurricanes.” For the Fiona year it reports that “In September 2022, Hurricane Fiona left all 1.5 million electricity customers in Puerto Rico without power. The average customer in Puerto Rico experienced almost 200 hours of electricity interruptions that year.”

Now the qualifier that has to travel with every one of those figures, in EIA’s own definition on the same page: “The System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) measures the total duration (in hours) an average customer experiences non-momentary power interruptions in a one-year period.”

An average across every customer of an entire territory for an entire year is not a duration any household experienced. Almost 200 hours as a territory average is entirely consistent with some customers restored in a day and others out for a month, and reading it as what a household went through is the same mistake as reading a national average as a forecast for your street. Use these figures for what they are good for, which is establishing that a place can have a routine interruption load an order of magnitude above the mainland’s before a storm arrives at all.

The precedent that is not one: Texas, February 2021

If you ask anyone about the worst power outage in recent American memory, you will get February 2021 in Texas. It is the wrong reference for this page, and knowing why protects you from a planning error rather than just a trivia error.

The two figures usually reached for come from a nine-page December 2022 FERC staff presentation tracking the responses to the joint staff report, and it records the event this way in its bottom-line bullets: “During the week of February 14, 2021, for over two consecutive days, ERCOT averaged 34,000 megawatts (MW) of generation outages, nearly half of ERCOT’s 2021 all-time winter peak load of 69,871 MW.” The same set of bullets records the “Largest firm load shed event in U.S. history (23,418 MW)”, ranking it third in the quantity of load taken out behind two blackouts those bullets date to August 2003 and August 1996.

Two corrections belong on that, and we are making them against the underlying document rather than the summary of it. The first is that over two consecutive days is not a duration of the blackout at all. In the November 2021 joint staff report it is the window across which ERCOT’s generation outages were averaged, from 7:00 a.m. on February 15 to 1:00 p.m. on February 17. The second is that the report does attach durations to the load shed, in several places. Its Figure 18 comparison of four cold-weather events pairs the 2021 event’s maximum firm load shed of 23,418 MW with 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, under a column the figure heads February 8 to 20, 2021. Its narrative is plainer: ERCOT “was forced to order an unprecedented 20,000 MW of firm load shed, more than twice the amount of load shed during the 2011 event, and to maintain firm load shed for nearly three days.” And at the end that matters to a household, the same report records: “More than 4.5 million people in Texas lost power during the Event, and some went without power for as long as four days, while exposed to below-freezing temperatures for over six days.”

So the contrast is not magnitude against no duration. It is roughly three days of sustained firm load shed, and up to four days without power at a house, against a small number of customers left off the grid for a month while a distribution system is rebuilt around them. Both are worth preparing for. They are not the same preparation, and the gear that covers a four-day event is exactly the gear this page is about to show you running out.

Water service in Texas that winter ran on a different and longer clock. That is a different utility with a different record, and it is not evidence about how long the power was off.

The Ceiling Arithmetic

This is the first of the two things this page exists to do.

Across its guides, this site publishes a runtime ceiling for the backup layers it recommends for animal-dependent equipment. Each of those figures is sourced on the page that publishes it, to a manufacturer, a retailer or a federal food-safety guideline, with that page’s own caveats attached. No page on this site has put them in one column.

Here they are in one column. Every figure below is one this site already publishes and already sources on the linked page. This table does not re-source them and does not add any figure of its own; it lines them up. It covers the layers that run unattended on stored energy, plus one generator’s published run time on one tank of fuel. One class of layer is deliberately not in it, because its ceiling is not a runtime at all, and it is named directly underneath.

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 that is not in the table. One backup layer this site recommends has no runtime ceiling to put in that column, and leaving it out silently would be the wrong kind of tidy. Our refrigerated pet medication page also profiles a powered portable medical fridge, and reports its manufacturer’s specification as refrigerator temperature held indefinitely below 95 degrees Fahrenheit ambient while it is powered, or roughly 30 hours passively on its gel pack at that same ambient. That device does not have an hours ceiling; it has a power ceiling, and the power ceiling is your battery bank, your vehicle, your solar panel or your generator. The same is true of a portable power station, whose hours come out of its own watt-hours divided by what you plug into it, which our generator versus power station comparison and its linked sizing guide work out per device. So the honest version of the table is that the passive layers end in hours, and the powered layers hand the question straight to the fuel and recharge problem two sections down.

Read the column. The longest number in it is about six days, and it is the one figure in the table that its own manufacturer does not publish. The longest manufacturer-published figure is 120 hours, for the largest warmer in that shipping-pack product line. Everything in the table that keeps a medication cold without power is under two days. The purpose-built reptile pack is under two days, and the largest shipping warmer is five. The generator and the rechargeable entries are the ones carrying an asterisk that says they can be extended, and the asterisk is the next section.

The arithmetic, stated out loud

Here is the comparison, and it is this site’s own arithmetic on published figures rather than a finding either the manufacturers or the agencies state.

DOE’s Ida final report puts approximately 16,000 Louisiana customers still out on day 25. Twenty-five days is 600 hours. The longest single runtime in the table above 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, which is one of the four dependencies our hub identifies rather than all of them. The longest manufacturer-published figure, 120 hours, covers 20 percent of it. The refrigerator holds for two thirds of one percent of it.

Maria’s tail is worse by an order of magnitude. Roughly 62,000 customers on day 195 is 4,680 hours. Nothing in that column is a rounding error away from mattering; the whole column is a rounding error against that number.

That is the finding. There is no gear answer at this tier, and it is not close, and it is not a matter of buying a larger version of the same thing. Every product this site recommends for an outage is a bridge. At a weeks-long restoration, the question a bridge answers is how long you have to arrange the animal’s departure, not whether you have to.

Four reasons the column is optimistic rather than pessimistic

The honest version of that arithmetic is more pessimistic than the table, for four reasons that are worth naming so nobody reads the ceilings as a floor.

These ceilings are not additive. A 40-hour heat pack and a 36-hour cooler do not combine into 76 hours of anything. They are separate devices solving separate dependencies, and your outage is running all of them at once. The correct way to read the table is that your household’s actual ceiling is the shortest figure among the layers your animals actually depend on, because that is the one that fails first and starts the problem.

Several of them are stated without the conditions that decide them. Our refrigerated medication page makes this point about one cooler that publishes a 36-hour hold with no outside temperature attached, which is a number that cannot be mapped onto your kitchen or your car. Our generator sizing page makes it about a run time stated at 25 percent load, which is almost certainly not the load your own equipment list produces. A published ceiling is a ceiling under the conditions of whatever test produced it, and your week two is not that test.

Two of them are ratings of a chemical reaction, not hours of usable warmth. The heat-pack row and the shipping-warmer row describe how long the pack’s own reaction is rated to run, which is not the same claim as hours of heat delivered to an animal. Our heat pack runtime page sources that distinction in full, and the half of it that matters at this tier is the pessimistic half: the manufacturer’s own account of a pack set out in an open room is that it feels only slightly warm to the touch because the open-air environment around it is too large for it to warm up properly, and the sellers that publish a low-temperature limit put it at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, below which the pack may stop working because the water inside it can freeze. A multi-day winter outage in an unheated house is exactly that condition. Reading these two rows as an upper bound is deliberate, and it only strengthens the conclusion this section draws.

Every layer that can be extended depends on the thing that is broken. A battery recharges from the grid, which is out, or from a solar panel, which has its own weather. A generator refuels from a pump, and the pump is electric. And the powered medical fridge named under the table, the one layer here with no hours ceiling of its own, inherits whichever of those two you are running it from. Which brings us to the second half of the fuel problem.

Fuel, and Why the Refuelable Layer Is Not Actually Unlimited

Our generator sizing page owns fuel runway, refuelling procedure and fuel storage, including the consequence that the equipment goes off during every refuel and that the gap has to be planned rather than discovered. This page does not restate any of that. What it adds is the supply side over weeks, which is a different question from how long one tank lasts.

Ready.gov names the effect in its own list of what an outage does. Among the consequences it publishes: a power outage may “Close retail businesses, grocery stores, gas stations, ATMs, banks and other services.” Ready.gov also opens the page with the framing that matters here: “Extended power outages may impact the whole community and the economy.” Neither sentence is scoped to a duration, and neither mentions an animal.

DOE’s Ida reports document what that looked like day by day. On September 9, 2021: “Widespread power outages, damage, flooding, and access constraints are leading to retail gas station closures in impacted areas. Due to limited availability from power outages, gas stations with power or operating on generator have reported long lines and high demand. The high demand at available stations has led to temporary fuel outages while stations wait for resupply.” The same report notes a state intervention, and we are reproducing DOE’s own spelling rather than tidying it: “The state is suppling generators to some retail stations.”

Eight days later, in Update #18, the picture is better and still not fixed. DOE attributes continuing retail gas station outages in the impacted areas to power outages, high demand, and fuel constraints at some offline refinery-based loading points and terminals. We are paraphrasing that first sentence rather than quoting it, because the phrase naming those loading points falls across a line break in DOE’s PDF and we cannot tell from the file whether the hyphen in it belongs to the source or to the typesetting. The two sentences that follow it are unambiguous, and they are the ones that matter to a household: “The retail station supply chain is continuing to stabilize. Some stations may still be unavailable due to power outages and/or damage.”

And months out, on a territory scale, DOE’s Puerto Rico summary for April 4, 2018 gives the count directly: “As of April 4, a total of 970 out of 1,100 retail gas stations are operational on Puerto Rico.” Roughly one station in eight was not operating on that date, more than six months after the storm. That fraction is ours; DOE publishes the two counts, and it does not say why any individual station was down.

The statute that proves the point by existing

There is a piece of state law that exists precisely because fuel pumps are electric, and it is worth reading carefully because a skim of it produces exactly the wrong conclusion.

Florida Statutes section 526.143 is headed “Alternate generated power capacity for motor fuel dispensing facilities.” One of its retail-outlet provisions, subsection (2), requires, for newly constructed or substantially renovated outlets issued a certificate of occupancy on or after July 1, 2006, that the outlet “shall be prewired with an appropriate transfer switch, and capable of operating all fuel pumps, dispensing equipment, lifesafety systems, and payment-acceptance equipment using an alternate generated power source.”

Read what that says and what it does not. It requires wiring and capability. It does not require a generator to be sitting at the station. The generator requirement is separate, and it is thin by design: “Each corporation or other entity that owns 10 or more motor fuel retail outlets located within a single county shall maintain at least one portable generator that is capable of providing an alternate generated power source as required under subsection (2) for every 10 outlets.” The sentence after that one adds to the requirement rather than softening it, and belongs with it: “If an entity owns more than 10 outlets or a multiple of 10 outlets plus an additional 6 outlets, the entity must provide one additional generator to accommodate such additional outlets.” The storage and availability condition that follows is one sentence with two limbs, and the first limb is what sets what the second is worth: “Each portable generator must be stored within this state, or may be stored in another state if located within 250 miles of this state, and must be available for use in an affected location within 24 hours after a disaster.” A separate paragraph covers an owner whose ten or more outlets all sit inside a single domestic security region: that owner must also hold a written document of agreement with one or more similarly equipped entities for the use of portable generators that may be used to meet that same generator requirement and that are located in Florida but outside the affected region, an agreement that “must guarantee the availability of the portable generators to an affected location within 24 hours after a disaster.” And the section carries an express waiver path allowing the department, on written request, to temporarily waive those requirements if the generators are used in preparation for or in response to an emergency or major disaster in another state.

A second retail provision reaches outlets regardless of when they were built, and it is the one written about the roads a household would actually drive out on. Subsection (3)(a) requires that a retail outlet “located within one-half mile proximate to an interstate highway or state or federally designated evacuation route must be prewired with an appropriate transfer switch and be capable of operating all fuel pumps, dispensing equipment, lifesafety systems, and payment-acceptance equipment using an alternate generated power source”, for outlets with 16 or more fueling positions in counties having a population of 300,000 or more, 12 or more fueling positions in counties having a population of 100,000 or more but fewer than 300,000, and eight or more fueling positions in counties having a population of fewer than 100,000. That subsection carries no construction-date condition at all, so the retail half of this statute reaches further than subsection (2) alone makes it look, and it reaches specifically the stations on the route a household with animals would be driving. Both retail subsections carry the same exemptions: subsection (4)(b) states that subsections (2) and (3) do not apply to an automobile dealer, a person who operates a fleet of motor vehicles, a person who sells motor fuel exclusively to a fleet, or an outlet holding a written agreement, in a form approved by the Division of Emergency Management, under which a public hospital supplies it with onsite generation.

Upstream of the pumps the same section goes further and requires an alternate power source to actually be available, not merely a circuit capable of accepting one, and that half belongs next to this one rather than left out. Each motor fuel terminal facility and each wholesaler selling motor fuel in the state “must be capable of operating its distribution loading racks using an alternate generated power source for a minimum of 72 hours”, and, pending a postdisaster examination of the equipment, must have that power source available for operation “no later than 36 hours after a major disaster”. That is a real 72-hour floor written into Florida law. Read where it sits: it is a floor at the terminal that loads the trucks, not at the pump your car is parked at.

Three scope limits travel with the retail half of that statute and none of them are optional. It is Florida law and nowhere else’s. It requires prewiring and alternate-power capability, not an on-site generator, for the retail outlets covered by subsections (2) and (3). And the actual generator ratio is one unit per ten outlets, deliverable within a day, waivable in writing.

So do not read this as a promise that Florida stations can pump. Read it as a legislature having concluded that a fuelling network on grid power is fragile enough to legislate about, and then legislating a ratio of one portable generator per ten stations at the retail end. If that is the shape of the requirement where a household actually buys fuel, planning a weeks-long animal-care strategy around driving to a pump is planning around a thin margin.

The instruction that follows from all of this is short, and the American Red Cross publishes it as a preparation step rather than a response step: “Keep your car gas tank at least half full.” Do it now. A half tank on day one is a departure option; a half tank you meant to top up is a queue.

The Destination Federal Guidance Names, and Whether It Holds for Weeks

This is the second of the two things this page exists to do, and it is the more important one.

Every relocation instruction read for this page points at the same kind of place, and none of them says how long you can stay there.

What the sources say

Ready.gov, on its power outage page, gives the instruction in one sentence: “Go to a community location with power if heat or cold is extreme.” In its preparation section it adds where to find one: “Check with local officials about heating and cooling locations open near you.”

The American Red Cross, on its power outage safety page, publishes the same decision as a trigger with named conditions. Under a heading about what to do during an outage: “Decide if you need to stay or go. Evacuate if your home is too hot or too cold, or if you have medical devices that need power. Communities often provide warming or cooling centers and power charging stations.” In its preparation guidance the same organisation writes: “Plan how to decide to stay or go. Plan how and when you will evacuate safely to maintain needs such as power-dependent medical devices. Keep your car gas tank at least half full.” And on the house itself: “If the weather is very hot or very cold, plan to go to a location with air conditioning or with heat.”

FEMA, in its Stay Safe and Warm Toolkit dated January 26, 2026, publishes the same instruction with a caveat none of the others carry. That document is a FEMA Advisory containing sample messaging for communities to republish, under a heading reading “Sample Text for Social Media, E-mails, Handouts, Articles, Flyers and More”. It is scoped to cold weather. Under the heading “Warming Stations” it publishes two bullets. The first: “If you can’t keep your house warm, go to a community warming center. Visit your community’s emergency management website to learn about warming centers or shelters. You can also call 211 which can help you locate help if you need it.” The second is the one almost nothing else in the federal literature says out loud: “Make a plan for your pets: Community warming centers may not allow pets. If possible, call to ask before leaving home with your pets. Your local humane society may have more information or resources.”

What the sources do not cover

Three gaps, stated precisely.

None of these instructions is scaled to duration. Every one of them is triggered by a condition inside the house: extreme heat or cold, a medical device without power. Not one says how long the outage has to be expected to run before you go, and not one says how long the destination is good for.

The Red Cross trigger is written about the household, not about an animal. That page does carry two sentences about animals, in a preparation list: “Creating a household evacuation plan that includes your pets” and “Prepare a pet emergency kit for your companion animals.” Neither of those sentences is joined to the evacuate sentence anywhere on the page. The trigger names your home being too hot or too cold and your medical devices, and the medical devices in question are people’s. An animal-scoped version of that trigger is not published there.

Ready.gov’s instruction says nothing about animals either. The words quoted above are the whole of it. Whether the community location it names admits an animal is a question those sentences do not raise.

What this site concludes

The following is this site’s own conclusion, drawn from putting the sources above next to one thing our own cooling and warming centers page already documents from state guidance: that a facility of this kind may be defined as a daytime gathering place rather than an overnight emergency shelter. We are not re-quoting that state guidance here, because we could not reach that agency’s page on the day this article was written; our sibling page carries the quotation and the date it was read, and it is the page to read for the destination question in full.

Put those together and the join is this. The destination that federal guidance names for an outage is a facility that may close at night and that FEMA’s own community messaging says may refuse your animal. That is a serviceable answer for an afternoon in a heat wave or an evening in a cold snap. It is not an answer for a three-week restoration, and no source read for this page joins those two facts in a single sentence, which is why this page is writing it.

Two practical consequences follow, and they are also ours rather than anybody’s published protocol.

The pet question at a public facility is a phone call, not a door decision. FEMA’s toolkit already tells you to call ahead. At a weeks-long tier the reason is stronger: if the answer is no, you need the next destination, and you need it before you have driven somewhere with an animal in the car and no plan B. Our cooling and warming centers page covers what the state guidance actually says about pets at these facilities, what a service animal question is instead, and how to find out for 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. Our what to do when your county has no pet-friendly shelter page builds that ladder in order, and do pet-friendly disaster shelters exist explains the co-located model where it does exist. Both are worth reading on a quiet afternoon, because the phone calls they describe are ones you cannot make well on day nine.

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

This deserves its own table, because the shape of the published record is itself the finding, and because a table with honest empty cells is more useful than prose that smooths them over.

Every cell below is what that source publishes, read on August 15, 2026, except the two rows drawn from pages on this site, which are marked as such. Where a source does not address something, the cell says not addressed rather than borrowing an answer from the row above.

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 your home is too hot or too cold, or if you have medical devices that need power.”	Not addressed	Not addressed in this sentence; the page’s two pet sentences sit in a separate preparation list
FEMA, Stay Safe and Warm Toolkit (Jan 26, 2026)	“If you can’t keep your house warm, go to a community warming center.”	Not addressed	Not in the trigger, but the adjacent bullet addresses pets: “Community 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

Two things to take from that table.

First, the negative claim this section rests on is narrow, and every negative on this page is scoped to what we read rather than to the literature as a whole: what we did not find published anywhere, in the sources read for this page, is a relocation trigger scaled to how long the outage will last. We are not saying no source publishes a relocation trigger. Three of them do, and they are quoted above. We are saying that the triggers that exist are keyed to conditions you can observe rather than to a duration you would have to predict.

Second, that is arguably the right design. You cannot observe how long an outage will last, and a rule built on a prediction would be a rule built on the least reliable input available. The condition-based triggers are the honest ones. What they do not do is help a household decide, on day four, whether to start making arrangements that take days to complete.

That gap is what the next section is for, and everything in it is ours.

A Decision Aid Built From Things You Can Actually Observe

This section is this site’s own reasoning, not a published protocol, and it does not tell you to leave at any particular hour. It is built entirely from things a household can look at, because a rule built from things you would have to guess is worse than no rule.

Nothing here overrides your veterinarian, an official evacuation order for an underlying hazard, or the species-specific thresholds our aquarium and reptile page publishes. If any of those says go, go.

Observation one: your actual ceiling, not the table’s. Walk the house and write down, for each animal-dependent load, the published runtime of the specific device you own, from that device’s own manual or manufacturer page. Your household’s ceiling is the shortest of them, not the longest, because the shortest is what fails first. Do this on paper before an outage. It takes fifteen minutes and it converts a vague worry into a number.

Observation two: what your utility is saying, and how it is changing. An estimated restoration time is a forecast, and its movement carries more information than its value. An estimate that slides repeatedly, or that gets replaced with language about rebuilding rather than repairing, is a different signal from one that holds. DOE reported that exact shift for Ida, writing that “Utilities have encountered extensive damage that will require rebuilding the system” and, six days earlier, that “some harder hit rural locations are days to weeks away from full restorations.” If your utility starts using that vocabulary about your area, you are in the tier this page is about.

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

Observation four: the animal. Symptoms override every arithmetic on this page. Our indoor temperature decay page carries what the veterinary and agency sources publish about signs to act on, and records that its own searches of the veterinary and federal sources found no published hours-to-danger figure for pets, and our hub carries the heatstroke signs that mean emergency care now rather than a further hour of watching. If an animal is showing signs, the destination is a veterinarian, not a community facility and not a further hour of insulation.

And one thing that is not an observation, but is the reason to decide early. Everything that makes leaving possible degrades over the same days the house does. Fuel gets harder, as the DOE reports above document. Roads can be the constraint rather than the car, which our re-entry access page documents at length for closures that ran for weeks. Boarding capacity fills. A friend still on grid power in week one may be hosting three other households by week two. The asymmetry is the argument: deciding early and being wrong costs you an unnecessary trip, and deciding late and being wrong costs you the options.

Refrigerated Medication at This Tier Is a Resupply Problem

Our refrigerated pet medication page owns the cold chain completely: what the veterinary insulin labels require, what the packout method is, what the two numbers to hand your vet are, 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 the packout method or the two numbers, and does not publish an hour count for a pet’s medication either.

What this page adds is the tier. At a weeks-long restoration, preservation is not the problem to be solving, because nothing in the ceiling table above holds refrigerator temperature for weeks on stored energy alone, and the one powered unit that holds it indefinitely holds it only for as long as you can keep powering it. The problem is supply.

Two published instructions point the same way, and both are written about people rather than animals, which is a scope that has to travel with them.

Ready.gov, in its guidance about returning after an outage, states: “If the power is out for more than a day, discard any medication that should be refrigerated, unless the drug’s label says otherwise. Consult your doctor or pharmacist immediately for a new supply.” That is the clearest duration-scoped sentence in this entire body of guidance, and its answer at day two is replacement. Read the whole of it before acting on half of it. That sentence is written about people, and about 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 of it 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, and it is the call to make before the supply is gone.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in its emergency guidance about human insulin, ends in the same place: “When properly stored insulin becomes available again, the insulin vials that have been exposed to these extreme conditions should be discarded and replaced as soon as possible.”

Now the boundary, stated as plainly as we can. That FDA document also publishes a figure many outage articles reach for: “Insulin products contained in vials or cartridges supplied by the manufacturers (opened or unopened) may be left unrefrigerated at a temperature between 59°F and 86°F for up to 28 days and continue to work.” Read the sentence FDA puts immediately after it, because it narrows the figure even inside its own domain: “However, an insulin product that has been altered for the purpose of dilution or by removal from the manufacturer’s original vial should be discarded within two weeks.”

That is human insulin. FDA published it on a page addressed to patients and their healthcare providers about a human supply, and it routes a question about a particular vial back to that same audience and to the manufacturers: “If patients or healthcare providers have specific questions about the suitability of their insulin, they may call the respective manufacturer at the following numbers:” This page will not hand that figure to you as an answer for an animal, and the reason is who FDA wrote it for rather than anything about what a household can or cannot measure at home.

Which label covers your animal may not be the veterinary one

There is a second branch here, and a short version of this subject gets it wrong. The two insulins FDA has approved for animals, Vetsulin and ProZinc, require continuous refrigeration and publish no owner-facing hour count at all, which our refrigerated pet medication page documents from the labels themselves. Not every diabetic pet is on one of those two.

Table 7.1 of the 2026 AAHA Diabetes Management Guidelines for Cats is a one-page PDF headed “Insulin Products for Cats”, downloaded on August 19, 2026 and extracted with pdftotext in both -layout and -raw modes, which agree on every word quoted from it here. It carries a column headed Veterinary FDA Approval Status, and two of its five product rows are marked Approved in that column: the Vetsulin row and the ProZinc row. The other three are marked Not approved, and the brand names under them are Lantus, Basaglar, Semglee, Rezvoglar, Tresiba, Toujeo and an unbranded glargine listed to the same two labelers as Semglee. That last entry’s name is printed in the PDF with a gamma-shaped character where the product’s own label has the letter y, which is why it is described here rather than quoted. The product description column calls every one of those rows recombinant DNA origin human insulin. So for a cat prescribed any of them, the carton in the house is a human one, and AAHA’s own column is what says that product carries no veterinary FDA approval to read instead. Calling the human figure a number borrowed from the wrong species, which is how an earlier version of this section put it, is wrong about that reader.

That table prints its own scope, and it belongs here with it: “This document is intended as a guideline only, not an AAHA standard of care.” It also prints starting doses, which are not this page’s to repeat and are not the thing a household is deciding during an outage.

None of that turns FDA’s 28 days into an outage answer for an animal, and this page still publishes no hour count for a pet’s medication. What it changes is the reason for the refusal, which has to be one that holds up: it is that FDA wrote that page for human patients and their healthcare providers, not that the carton belongs to another species. Our page on what each insulin label actually says sets both veterinary labels beside ten human ones and prints what each of them publishes. Which document covers your animal, and what a weeks-long outage does to it, is for the veterinarian who wrote the prescription.

So the weeks-tier action is a set of phone calls, and the time to make them is early:

• Ask your veterinarian what your specific medication tolerates and what an early refill would take. Our emergency and early prescription refills page covers who actually has that authority and why the day counts are state law rather than 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 instruction is to have that conversation in advance: “Talk to your medical provider about a power outage plan for medical devices powered by electricity and refrigerated medicines. Find out how long medication can be stored at higher temperatures and get specific guidance for any medications that are critical for life.” That sentence is about people. The pet version of it is the same call to a different clinician, and this site is making that extension explicitly rather than implying that Ready.gov wrote it about animals.

If a human in your household depends on a powered medical device, that is not in a queue with an aquarium heater and this page will not rank them. Settle that plan with the device manufacturer, the supplier and the prescribing clinician, and let it set the household’s decisions.

What This Page Does Not Own

A weeks-long outage touches every problem this site covers, and the temptation to re-derive all of it here is exactly how a page ends up contradicting its own siblings. Here is the map instead. Each of these pages carries more detail, more sources and more caveats than a summary here could.

The days-scale outage, and the four clocks. Our power outage hub is the parent page. It defines which of four situations you are in, covers the four household dependencies that genuinely need backup power, and carries the carbon monoxide rules that do not relax because an outage is long.

Species thresholds and how fast your house changes. Our indoor temperature decay and species thresholds page covers what the published record does and does not contain about temperature and animals, and how to measure your own building’s rate of change with a thermometer and an hour. This page does not publish a competing threshold for any species.

Tanks and enclosures, including when to move the animal. Our aquarium and reptile outage page publishes the species-specific relocation triggers, the decision table between a battery pump, a power station and moving the animal, and the rules for using a running vehicle as a bridge. This page defers to those triggers rather than publishing its own.

Fuel runway, refuelling and generator sizing. Our generator sizing for pet loads page covers running watts, starting watts, a published run time and what it assumes, the refuelling gap, and fuel storage. This page adds only the supply side over weeks.

The two-week household reserve. Our long-term pet food and water storage page reconciles the duration figures four authorities publish and builds the shelter-in-place reserve. The only thing a weeks-long restoration adds is that it is designed to outlast that floor: a reserve built to a two-week standard is a reserve that ends inside the events documented at the top of this page.

The improvisations that arrive at hour twelve. Our outage improvisations that endanger pets page covers unvented heaters, candles and dry ice, and our generators and carbon monoxide page covers the CO rules in full. A long outage produces these decisions by attrition rather than by ignorance, which is a reason to read them before you are tired and cold, not after.

Getting back to an animal you are separated from. Our re-entry access page covers closures that ran for weeks and how escorted access and re-entry passes actually work. If the outage came with a closure, that page is the one you need before this one.

The stay-or-go decision for the underlying hazard. Our shelter in place or evacuate page works through the decision when the outage is a symptom of something else. 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 the short ones on purpose.

• Write down the published runtime of every backup device you actually own, from its own manual or manufacturer page, and circle the shortest one. That is your household’s real ceiling, and it is the number the rest of this list works against.
• 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 attached 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. Do this even if a public facility says yes.
• Keep the car’s tank at least half full, as the American Red Cross instructs, so that 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 that a change in its language reaches you.
• Read the improvisation and carbon monoxide pages linked above before an outage, not during one. Those decisions get made when people are cold and tired.
• Agree in advance, with everyone in the household, on what would make you leave. A trigger you set in daylight is easier to act on than one you negotiate 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, and the days you have are the ones before the fuel and the roads get harder.

What a Household Actually Gets Right Here

If this page has a single practical conclusion, it is that 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 is what buys the hours during which the phone calls can be made and the drive can be taken. That is a real function and it is worth owning the right gear for it. 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 as something it never claimed to be.

The federal record says restorations run to weeks and, in the worst case documented on this page, to months. The manufacturers say hours. Nobody is lying in either sentence. They are answering different questions, and the household in the middle is the one that has to notice.

Where to Go Next

This page is the weeks-tier spoke of our power outage hub, and it covers one thing: what to do when restoration outlasts every runtime you own.

If you do not know which outage you are in. The power outage hub defines the four clocks and covers the days-scale case in full.

If the question is temperature. Indoor temperature decay and species thresholds covers what is published about how fast a house changes and what each species tolerates.

If the question is the destination. Pets at cooling and warming centers covers what state guidance actually says about animals at those facilities, and when your county has no pet-friendly shelter builds the private ladder.

If the question is medication. Refrigerated pet medication in an outage is the page, and emergency and early prescription refills covers the resupply half.

If the question is supplies. Long-term pet food and water storage builds the reserve this tier is designed to outlast.

Then do the one thing on this page that costs nothing and changes the most. Take fifteen minutes 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. Everything above is the reason they belong together.