earthquake kits

This weekend was spent doing a lot of responsible, grown up activities. We went to the garden center to buy herbs. We reorganized our kitchen shelves. We went to the Container Store. We made earthquake kits.

{my earthquake kit}

Living in San Francisco, I've experienced my fair share of minor earthquakes but I never got around to putting together an emergency earthquake kit before. I think it's probably because as soon as I start to think about the idea of a terrible earthquake, I completely freak myself out and then quickly try to put it out of my mind. But after talking about it with Daniel last week, we decided that it was wantonly irresponsible to be so unprepared, so on Sunday we set about assembling our kits- ones for our cars and then one for the apartment.

This is what I put in the kit I'll be keeping in the trunk of my car:

• Swiss army knife
• flashlight
• batteries
• first aid kit
• energy bars (3)
• energy gel
• toilet paper
• waterproof matches
• socks
• water bottle
• thermal blanket
• parachute cord
• heat packs
• fire starters
• iodine tablets
• liquid soap
• 2 gallons of water
• 1 trash bag

We looked around in REI and saw that they had a couple of different emergency kits that you could buy, but they were really expensive and we weren't sure that all the things they included were necessary. Instead, I got a little plastic box with a handle at the Container Store and filled it with the aforementioned items. Everything packed up very neatly into the smallish box (except the big jug of water) and I do feel a bit more at peace knowing that I have these things organized and stored together in one place. I've heard it's a good idea to have some cash as well as copies of important documents and we also have a hand held crank radio, but all of those things we would probably add to the house kit rather than leave in our cars. Still, I'd be curious if anyone had any other suggestions for essentials to include in our kits?