What 19 governments tell households to keep at home

What this is, and where every line comes from

Every civil-protection authority publishes a list of what a household should keep at home. None of them publishes the other eighteen. This page puts 19 of those lists side by side, with a link to each authority so any line can be checked at the source.

Nothing here is our recommendation. Where the lists disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved, because a household in Vienna is being told something genuinely different from a household in Lisbon and averaging the two would be true in neither place.

What almost every country asks for

Seven things appear on nearly every list: drinking water, food that keeps without a fridge, a light that is not a phone, a radio that runs without mains power, copies of documents, prescription medication, and a first aid kit.

The agreement is worth noticing before the differences. A household that has those seven has done most of what nineteen governments independently arrived at, and everything below is refinement.

Iodine tablets, and the sharpest disagreement on the list

10 of the 19 put iodine tablets on the official household list: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. The other 9 do not mention them at all.

The split follows method. Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Ireland issue or recommend them nationally, so an address does not come into it. The Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden and Canada set a distance instead: France works to 20 kilometres with an extended band to 100, Germany to 100, Switzerland to 50, Canada from 10 to 50, and Sweden names the zones around Forsmark, Oskarshamn and Ringhals.

The practical consequence is that two households the same distance from the same reactor, on opposite sides of a border, are told different things. Tablets are taken only when the authorities say so, and never in advance.

Three countries where the answer is a room

Three countries answer with a room rather than a bag: Finland, Israel, and Switzerland. Their official guidance is not only about what to keep but about where to go. Switzerland assigns households to a Schutzraum. Finland requires a väestönsuoja in larger buildings, which means most detached houses have none and the guidance says so plainly. Israeli homes have a mamad, and the list of what belongs in it is separate from the list of what belongs in the house.

Finland and Israel both ask for tape, to seal the gaps around windows and vents. That is the instruction that turns an ordinary room into a shelter.

Prescription medication: three days, seven days, or a month

The range here is wider than anywhere else on the list. Finland asks for 3 days. The Netherlands, Denmark and Israel ask for 7. Sweden asks for a month, which is four times what most of Europe asks for and takes a conversation with a pharmacy rather than a trip to a shop.

Whatever the figure where you live, the constraint is the same everywhere: a repeat prescription cannot be brought forward on the day it is needed, so the stock is built by asking early, once.

The things only one country asks for

• Portugal is the only country where the item is a legal duty with an inspection behind it: the fuel-management strip around a building in forest land, fifty metres for a house and a hundred for a village, with a deadline set every year.
• Sweden is the only country that asks households to write down a radio frequency. P4 is the designated emergency channel and the frequency is local, so it is worth looking up before it matters.
• Denmark is the only country whose guidance spends its words explaining that you do not have to do anything: the mobile warning is cell broadcast, so there is no app, no sign-up, and nothing the authorities learn about your phone.
• The United States is the only country that measures water in gallons, which is where the odd-looking 3.785 litres per person per day comes from.

The data behind this page, free to reuse

Everything above is published as an open dataset, the RainWillCome Readiness Standards Index, version 1.0. Every source was last checked against the publishing authority on 2026-08-28.

Use it, republish it, build on it. The one condition is attribution: name RainWillCome and link to this page, so a reader can check the figures at the authorities themselves. How every figure was gathered, what an empty cell means and which two fields involve a judgement are all set out at /en/readiness-standards-index-method.

What this comparison does not show

• Where an authority publishes no figure the cell is empty and nothing has been estimated to fill it. Portugal sets a 72-hour horizon and names water without ever quantifying it, so its water cells stay blank.
• Most of these water figures are drinking and cooking only. Ordinary household use, including washing and flushing, runs to well over a hundred litres per person per day.
• Iodine on the official list means the item appears in that country's household guidance. It does not mean every household there needs it: six of the ten set a distance from a reactor instead.
• This covers the nineteen countries where we hold verified data with a citable source. It is not every country, and a country missing here has not been assessed and found wanting.
• Agencies get renamed and guidance gets revised. The collection date above is when each source was last opened and checked, and it moves when they are checked again.

Every country, its authority, and how long it plans for

Portugal is the one entry with no number. ANEPC sets the horizon at 72 hours and names water in the kit without ever quantifying it, so this table leaves the cell empty rather than filling it with a plausible figure their government never published.