How this library is written and checked
Every authoritative figure here is quoted from a named public body and linked. Country figures are published as they are rather than averaged, because they genuinely disagree. Practical guidance is written from practice; anything clinical is quoted from a health authority or left out. Each page carries the date it was last checked against its sources.
A review date is the day someone opened the source and confirmed the figure still reads as the guide says it reads.
Last checked against its sources on
Where the facts come from
Every number on this site that carries authority comes from a named public body, and the page names it. How many days of self-sufficiency a country recommends, how many litres of water per person, which channel warns the public, what the emergency number is: all of that is quoted, sourced and linked, not summarised from memory.
Those figures disagree with each other across countries, and we publish the disagreement rather than an average. Germany plans on ten days. Austria plans on fourteen. Switzerland plans on seven. An average of the three would be true nowhere and would be presented as if it were true everywhere.
You only ever see your own country
A page written for Germany names German agencies. It will not mention a Dutch one, and a Dutch page will not mention a German one. The agency names come from one table shared by every page and every language, so a body that gets renamed changes everywhere at once.
This is checked automatically rather than by hand. A test runs a household from each country through every advice surface on the site and fails the build if any of them meets another country’s institutions.
What we will not write
There is a line, and it is worth stating exactly where it runs.
- On the practical side of the line, which is most of this library: how to plan a route out, how to pack and stage a bag by the door, how to run a drill with children, how to organise documents, how a household stays warm. This is written from practice.
- On the other side: medication doses, first-aid protocols, water-treatment chemistry, and anything with a number attached to a human body. These are quoted from a named health authority or not published at all.
- No page here interprets a clinical instruction, softens one, or fills a gap in one with a reasonable guess.
A worked example of the line: this site tells you to purify water with tablets or drops sold for the purpose, and gives no bleach dosing at all. Bleach concentrations vary by product and country, the arithmetic is easy to get wrong in the dark, and the failure is not a gentle one. So the guidance stops where our confidence does.
What the review date means
Every page carries the date it was last checked against its sources. It is the date somebody opened the authority’s own page and confirmed the figure still says what the guide says it says.
Agencies get renamed and merged, and guidance gets revised. When that happens the page changes and the date moves. When nothing has changed, the date still moves, because the checking is the thing being dated.
Corrections
If a page is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed. Local knowledge beats a national summary, and the people who catch these things are usually the ones who live there. The contact route is on the imprint.