Library
Free household readiness guides
Plain guides to the things that stop working, written for one country at a time, with every figure quoted from the body that published it.
All of it is free and none of it needs an account. Nothing you read here is stored, counted or sent anywhere. Where a page gives a number, it names the authority that published it and links to their page, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Guides
- What to do in a long power outage
Most power cuts end in hours. This is how a household stays warm, eats, keeps light and stays reachable when one lasts three days.
Reference tables
- What 19 governments tell households to keep at home
Nineteen national civil-protection lists, side by side, with a link to each authority. They disagree about iodine, about medication, and about how many days to plan for.
- How much water to store, and for how many days
Every country publishes its own figure, and the totals range by a factor of seven. This is what each one says, and why averaging them is wrong.
- Emergency numbers and public alert systems, country by country
Which number to call in 19 countries, which channel warns the public, and whether it reaches you by itself or only if you signed up.
- How the Readiness Standards Index is made
Scope, sources, field definitions, the two places this involves judgement, and how to cite it. Written so the figures can be checked rather than trusted.
Official sources
- Official preparedness sources, country by country
356 official emergency preparedness sources across 15 countries, grouped by country, each linked to the authority that publishes it.
About this library
- About RainWillCome
Who runs this site, how it is paid for, what it does with your data, and how to tell us a page is wrong.
- How this library is written and checked
Where the figures come from, why we never average them across countries, what we refuse to write, and what the review date on each page means.
Written for readers in United States. The guides name that country's own agencies and its own official figures.
Also in: Deutsch, Nederlands
The guidance is free because it is public. Governments publish it. What is missing is the work of putting it in one place and keeping it current. What RainWillCome sells is the part a page cannot do: remembering your household, doing the arithmetic for the people actually in it, printing it so it works when the screen does not, and watching for the things that would change it.