5 Best Earthquake Kits That Will Prepare You For Any Emergency in 2024 (TESTED)

U.S. Geological Survey on its site has provided comprehensive information on earthquakes across the globe. It identifies Los Angeles & San Francisco in California as the most earthquake-prone areas in the US.

The statisticians suggest that the first 72 hours after any disaster, including an earthquake, hurricane, or tornado, are crucial. So, a preparedness of 72 hours can be a lifesaver for people hit by any such emergency.

So, to identify the best earthquake kits, we have tested several 72 hours-emergency kits for different conditions.

For instance, we searched many kits for the city dwellers to identify the best in the category. Similarly, we explored many car first-aid kits and survival kits for the long term as both would have different requirements during the emergency.

After extensive research, we have shortlisted five best earthquake kits suitable in different categories.

Best Overall

Emergency Zone 2 Person Family Prep 72 Hour Survival Kit

This earthquake kit from Emergency Zone is the number one choice for the year. The kit comprises everything that you can think of and all that in an unimaginably compact size.

It is versatile and is useful in many emergency situations. However, despite being so versatile, it is packed so discretely that it will not be noticeable during the emergency, keeping them safe when most needed.

Packed in a red backpack, the kit weighs as light as 16.1 pounds. This makes it extremely easy to carry during any emergency.

However, the lightweight does not mean that you have to compromise with the items that you would need during the first 72 hours of the emergency.

Yes, it includes a good quantum of food and water with two food bars of 3600 calories and 12 pouches of 4.2 ounces. The food bars are nutritious and delicious. They come with a 5-year shelf life and are safe as they are US Coast Guard approved.

The kit also contains 118 emergency first-aid kit pieces, items for light shelter and warmth including two reflective sleeping bags, one tube tent, a weather band radio, and tools like a pencil, a 5 in 1 whistle, and rope, etc.

The bag though is compact yet has a smart design. Even with all these items, it still has enough space to keep your personal belongings like clothing and medications, etc.

Best for City Dwellers

EVERLIT Complete 72 Hours Earthquake Bug Out Bag

Earthquakes in the apartment can be the most horrifying situation for anyone. Yet your preparedness can definitely help you in alleviating the problems caused by it.

Your readiness is determined by the kind of earthquake kit that you have as a city dweller. And to decide on the right kind of emergency kit for home, you need to ascertain your exact requirements in case of an emergency.

The sufficient quantity of approved quality food and water for three days is the basic requirement. EVERLIT Complete 72 Hours Earthquake Bug Out Bag has that in plenty. Three thousand six hundred calories food bar and 24X125ml water pouches with 5-year shelf-life can bear the most torrid temperatures from -40 Degree Celsius to +99 Degree Celsius.

The 200-pieces First Aid Kit has provision for many items, including useful stationery items, sanitation products, and even a whistle that you may need to call for help at any time during the emergency situation.

Besides, it contains all essential items for shelter and lighting not only to help you during the earthquake but also during any other emergency like a hurricane, flood, or wind storm.

Moreover, items for communication also find their place in this versatile survival kit to establish contact or get the right information too necessary during these hours of crisis.

You always want to keep your emergency bag hidden during the entire duration of storage yet visible to be able to find it out quickly during the emergency. The compact backpack is amazingly designed to serve the dual contrasting functions with an overall discrete design coupled with reflective front and back strips for easy visibility.

Best for Long Term

Complete Earthquake Bag (for 5 persons, 3 days)

The rescue team may take some time to come up for your help in a disaster. Standard emergency kits are designed to allow you to take care of yourself and your family for this duration, which usually suffices for up to 72 hours.

However, emergencies like an earthquake can actually create such roadblocks that the rescue team cannot reach for your help even beyond 3 days.

If you live in any such location, you need to be prepared for a long-term emergency.

And how to do that is no big question with Complete Earthquake Bag offering supplies for five persons, three days, or to say for two persons for a week.

Yes, this earthquake preparedness kit provides five times as much of 3600 calories food bars with 60 pouches of water of 5-year shelf life. Besides, five hydration bags with straws and 50 tablets for water purification would cater to your water requirements for an even longer duration.

Moreover, the 107-piece First Aid Kit and other paraphernalia ensure you survive on your own without requiring any support from outside for all these days.

Apart from the big items like sleeping bags, emergency ponchos, and the tube tents, the kit also includes some small yet highly useful items like a hand crank flash, a radio a phone charger, a whistle, and a nylon rope.

The whole loaded bag is not particularly light, however; it is equipped with smooth-rolling wheels and telescopic handle for easy movement.

Best for Car

Sustain Supply Co. Premium Emergency Survival Bag/Kit

Twelve servings of nutritious and tasty food, 33.8 ounces of water cartons, and two water filtration straws take complete care of food requirements for a couple for 3 days.

However, Sustain Supply Co. Premium Emergency Survival Bag/Kit must offer more than these basic requirements to qualify as the Best Earthquake Kit for Car.

Looking beyond the basics, it also contains many gears for emergency, including snap lights & LED lanterns, emergency blankets, and knife, etc.

But what are those unique items that set apart Sustain Supply from all other emergency kits to become our favorite car kit?

For that, you need to imagine a situation where are you are stuck in your car while being on a trip in the wild or remote areas. And your survival requirements have to be beyond the regular food supplies.

Yes, a combo of portable cooking Stove, InstaFire fire starter, and a whistle makes this kit the winner in the best car kit category.

All these highly valuable items are packed in a durable backpack that still has space to store some more personal belongings.

The only thing missing from this kit is a compass, so get one yourself and put it inside the bag.

Best Budget

Blue Coolers Blue 72 Hour Emergency Backpack Survival Kit

Your preparedness for an earthquake depends on multiple factors. The history of the location you reside in, the connectivity of your location, and your neighborhood are some of the critical factors you must consider before getting an earthquake kit.

After proper analysis, if you realize that your requirements to deal with the emergency are limited to only a few essentials, there is no need to spend your hard-earned money in buying some comprehensive kits.

Blue Coolers Blue Seventy-Two Hour Survival Kits offer you a highly budget-friendly option with all necessary essential items plus a few more for your emergency kit.

It consists of 2,400 calories worth of food bar, five drinking water pouches of 4.22 ounces each, three pieces first aid kit and emergency supplies like a battery-free crank flashlight, an emergency blanket, rain poncho, and whistle/compass combo, etc.

Our Best Budget Kit is also very easy to store and maintain at all times.

Bonus: Best Earthquake Kit for Pets

Your pets deserve their own package of rations and equipment for survival during emergencies too!

In a disaster situation, animals will be hungry, thirsty, and possibly at risk of harm just like you.

So, get these Earthquake Survival Kits for pets that contain pet supplies and a first-aid kit to help our furry friends.

Analysis and Test Results

To identify the best earthquake kits, we needed to evaluate them against the most important factors required in different categories and present them objectively.

Apart from the basic essential emergency requirements, each category would have its own specific needs as well. For instance, the long-term kit would require a sizeable quantum of each material so that it is able to serve you for a long duration. A car kit, however, may have a different requirement of say, having a cooking stove.

Looking at specific requirements for each category, we have evaluated each of these shortlisted kits against a selected matrix of different factors.

We are presenting here the objective review of all these kits against these important factors.

Features

If someone asks you about what items that you would like to have with you during an emergency, your spontaneous response would be, “Enough quantity of good quality water and food.”

Right, and that is what most of the earthquake kits would always have in their supplies.

Well, these shortlisted kits are no exception. All of them have enough quantity of approved quality water and food to handle a 72 hours emergency.

However, Complete Earthquake Bag – Emergency kit (5 persons, 3 days) is ahead of others in the quantity of food, water, and other paraphernalia it offers. The quantity of all essential items is large enough for five persons or your family for three days. Even if you use this item for yourself, you actually have an emergency kit for 15 days. All these packed nicely in a small luggage-like bag. Isn’t it phenomenal?

Yes, it is and that is why it goes a few steps ahead in becoming the first choice for our long-term earthquake kit.

Well, if the Complete Earthquake kit has the maximum quantity, Emergency Zone 2 Person Family Prep 72 Hour Survival Kit would surprise you with its wide variety. This kit has got almost everything and more that you can imagine having in an emergency kit.

Apart from the sufficient quantity of food and water supply, it has high numbers of first aid kit pieces. Besides, it includes items for light shelter and warmth and many important tools, including a weather band radio. These unique features set it apart from all others in the race of becoming the best earthquake kit.

However, even this kit misses out on something that lags it behind in the competition for the best car kits.

And…what is that? – A portable stove and InstaFire fire starter.

Do you know why these items are so essential in a car kit?

They are extremely helpful while you are on a car trip in the wild and stuck with the emergency. Sustain Supply Co. Premium Emergency Survival Bag/Kit hits the bar by providing these essential tools with their survival kit making it the most robust contender for the best for car among these top five earthquake kits.

In a car, you already have car lights and a USB device charger, but what about a city dweller? It is pretty difficult for a city dweller to arrange for these items during an emergency. And that is where 72HRS Deluxe Earthquake Preparedness Kit scores over others as the Best Earthquake Kit for city dwellers. The 205 pieces large emergency kit includes a hand-crank powered light and a USB charger among many other essential items required in an earthquake kit.

American Red Cross has recommended a list of minimum items for an emergency kit viz. food, water, and blankets, etc. Blue Coolers Blue 72 Hour Emergency Backpack Survival Kit offers you exactly the same plus a few more goodies at a very low price. It, therefore, proudly enrolls in the Budget Pick category of our shortlisted earthquake kits.

Bag Quality

One of the biggest challenges in preparing an earthquake kit is to design a bag that is able to hold all the essential items required in the kit and still remain handy and easy to carry, or even run with it.

All the selected models fair pretty well in this aspect with Blue Coolers Blue 72 Hour Emergency Backpack Survival Kit weighing the least for the obvious reason of having only the essential items in the kit. However, the bag has the dimensions to hold additional items that you may like to have during an emergency. At a little over 5 pounds, this backpack has the highest portability among all the kits. True to its name, the bag is in a cool blue color and in our opinion, is quite modern in style and trendy looking.

Complete Earthquake Bag – Emergency kit (5 persons, 3 days) is the heaviest of all weighing over 35 pounds, and why not? It has supplies to meet emergencies for five people for three days. However, to provide portability, the bag has rolling wheels coupled with comfortable telescopic handles.

The high-quality bag material provides much-needed durability to the bag even during the rough & tough usage peculiar during times of emergencies.

We were quite impressed with 72HRS Deluxe Earthquake Preparedness Kit for the reflective strips it has provided both on the front as well the on back strip. It helps in making the bag easily visible from a far distance during an emergency.

However, one of the most impressive bags is offered by Sustain Supply Co. Premium Emergency Survival Bag/Kit.

The Sustain Supply is amazingly compact, considering the kind of items it holds. However, it is more to do with the selection of items rather than the design of the bag per se. The foldable bowls & stoves and InstaFire tinder that carries high calorific value in a small size of packing- they all make it possible for the bag to be so compact and lightweight.

However, we could not hold our surprise by looking at the bag offered by Emergency Zone 2 Person Family Prep 72 Hour Survival Kit. Yes, the bag has been meticulously designed, taking care of minutest of details that would make it as one of the most comfortable, user-friendly, and durable of all the bags.

At 16.01 pounds, this backpack is pretty lightweight, and the dimensions of 18.2 X 12.5 X 10.6 inches make it highly compact. However, these are not the most surprising qualities of this bag. It has a lot more to offer than the high portability.

It is discrete, thus avoiding unwanted attention during the storage, thereby keeping it safe all the time.

Thanks to the large main compartment and 12 pockets, the bag, despite having a lot of essential items, still have enough space to keep your personal belongings like clothing, toiletries, and medications.

While during an emergency, you will not know if you have to walk long distances. The bag comfort becomes a highly important criterion in those situations. Though the size and weight of the bag play a vital role yet you cannot ignore the role of the good design of the bag in enhancing the comfort level to an even higher degree.

Emergency Zone offers a breathable padded mesh back that allows proper circulation of air and protects you from the menace of sweating even during the hot weather conditions.

The reinforced padded straps do not let your shoulder strain and you feel light and comfortable even while walking long distances. Moreover, the adjustable chest strap allows setting the strap at the comfort level of the holder.

Support

There cannot be anything more delightful for a consumer than a wonderful product supported equally well by the company’s goodwill and its customer support team. Yes, trust-building is far trickier than product building.

While shortlisting the best products in any category based on the product features can be pretty straightforward, reviewing a brand from the softer aspects offers a bigger challenge.

And once we finalize on the best in the category, it is often difficult to really compare them and choose the best among the best on the aspect of support. They are all almost similar and that is why they have found their places in the topmost slots in their respective categories.

A few of the factors that we mainly consider while selecting the best include the level of trust and the brand reputation, the confidence the company shows over its product by offering the warranty, and its return policy.

If serving more than a decade in the field of supplying survival kits is the criteria for a good company, Emergency Zone would definitely be rated much above Redfora.  Redfora who offers emergency kits under the brand name Complete Earthquake Bag, has been in the business for around five years only.

However, it does not make Redfora any less confident about its products. Emergency Zone kit offers its customers to return the product within 30 days if not satisfied, while Complete Earthquake Bag offers it for 60 days return period.

The product return policy of Sustain Supply and Blue Coolers is similar to that of Emergency Zone.

However, 72HRS Deluxe stands apart and offers a one-year limited warranty on its survival kits.

Each of the above company offers multiple options to contact them. You can chat or e-mail them. Besides you can contact them by calling on their toll-free numbers provided at their respective websites.

Value

The value of a product is a factor of its cost, quantity, and its utility in multiple situations.

Though all the earthquake kits that we have shared with you tick most of the boxes yet each one of them has more ticks than the others for different factors.

If value means providing what is essentially required at the cheapest price range, there is no competition to Blue Coolers Emergency Kit. And that is why we pick it as our best budget earthquake survival kit for the year.

However, if value means providing the wholesome quantity at a little higher price, then the Complete Earthquake Bag – Emergency kit (5 persons, 3 days) wins the bet comprehensively. The package has everything that you need and more for a longer duration or more people.

The kit can be used for multiple disasters including floods, storms, hurricanes, and doomsday scenarios as well.

So, can we declare the Complete Earthquake Bag as the most valuable emergency kit?

Well, although it offers a great solution in the situation where the emergency situation can extend for longer periods, for normal emergencies it offers more items than required.

Therefore, it befits perfectly as the best long-lasting disaster kit for the year.

Now, if we consider other factors in determining the most valuable among them, the remaining three are all very tough competitors in the race.

Sustain Supply Co. Premium Emergency Survival Bag/Kit has a lot of unique features to offer. However, some of them are more specific to certain conditions rather than typical emergencies. Also, being in the higher price range it loses some of its points in being our best overall emergency kit.

Nonetheless, with some of the stand-out features mentioned earlier, it provides immense value in our best for the car category.

Furthermore, with the kind of features that 72 Hrs Deluxe offer, we couldn’t stop ourselves from ranking it as the best emergency kit for the City Dwellers for the running year.

Finally, after evaluating the variety of features and comfort level along with the comprehensive information guide that Emergency Zone 2 Person Family Prep 72 Hour Survival Kit offers, we ranked it at the top of the table for the Best Overall Earthquake Kit.

Overall Performance Score

Frequently Asked Questions

Descriptions are not enough until they calm all your rising curiosities. So, why not quench them directly?

Now, we are going to answer some of the questions that might be crossing your mind after going through our reviews.

Do I Need an Earthquake Kit?

Well, the answer to this question is quite obvious. If you live in a seismically vulnerable area, that is, the region which is prone to earthquakes, having such a kit is a must.

In the United States, regions of Alaska, California, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Hawaii, and even Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc are closer to tectonic borders, and are thus, at a higher risk.

In addition, even if you do not belong to such regions with higher chances of an earthquake, going with an earthquake kit is a right choice as it will not only keep you on the safer side in the situation of an earthquake, but it will also be equally beneficial in defending yourself against calamities like hurricanes, tsunamis, cyclones, etc.

Therefore, these life-saving kits are helpful in areas over tectonic borders as well as for coastal regions. They, in addition, may serve you well during even a lockdown situation.

What Important Features Should I Look for in an Earthquake Kit?

There are a wide variety of earthquake kits available in the market for you. And each one of those is a pack of multiple unique and special features. But what matters the most is the quantity of good quality of water and food.

Now, apart from the essentials, another feature that you should look for in an earthquake survival kit is its portability.

For a hazardous situation, you can’t rely on a heavy and huge bag that demands humongous efforts in carrying it with yourself. Thus, a compact size and lightweight kit should be the utmost priority.

Once you ensure sufficient portability of your backpack, start hunting for other items, their quantities, etc. Also, always try to ensure the reliability of the kit from the quality point of view.

Features like water resistance, tear resistance, smash-proof, etc. are also significant elements and must be given due consideration.

What Essentials Should I Have in an Earthquake Kit?

Well, it depends on the location you reside in and the locations you normally visit.

California Earthquake Authority recommends a list of basic items that you must have in your earthquake preparedness kit. It includes food and water for 72 hours, first aid kit for family, medications, and sanitation items.

Besides, you should be alert of power outages and disruption of communication channels. For this, you must include a flashlight, battery-free hand-cranked radio, and cell phones with chargers.

You should also bring along important documents related to the identity of you and your family members, medical prescriptions, passports, contact numbers of your family members, and insurance policies, etc.

Your earthquake kit should also include an emergency blanket, a multipurpose tool, and a map of the area. Besides, you should carry extra cash with you during the time of emergency.

Apart from these basic necessities, you should consider the specific requirements of all your family members like the kids, the elderly, the female members, and also the pets.

If you are living in an earthquake-prone area, you may consider these accessories too: whistle, matchboxes or lighter, gloves, duct tape, waste bags, portable stove with fire starter, foldable utensils, sleeping bags, and tube tents, etc.

Why Should I Buy an Earthquake Kit Instead of DIY?

Well, building your own Earthquake kit has the advantage of customization. That means you can select items as per your requirements.

However, DIY kits have some disadvantages as well. If you buy individual items for your kit, it would cost you more than buying the pre-made kits available in the market.

Secondly, you might forget to keep some essential items in a DIY kit that you may require during an emergency.

Most of the emergency kits contain food and water supply with 5 years shelf life and some also have freeze-dried food with up to 25 years of the expiration date. So, you do not need to replenish food items too often. This further saves on your expenses to maintain the emergency kits. It is more difficult to source certified-safe rations by yourself.

Having said that, it is your personal preference whether you wish to make or buy your Earthquake kit.

Where Should I Store the Earthquake Kit?

The right question should instead be, “Where should I store these earthquake kits?’

Yes, you may need to have more than one earthquake kit because you never know where the emergency would occur.

So, the three important locations where you should store your earthquake kits are your home, your car, and your place of work.

In your home, you can identify a designated place; it may be even outside your home, but definitely not under direct sunlight. The idea is that during the storage, you should be able to ensure its safety, and when disaster strikes, you should be able to retrieve the kit in the shortest amount of time possible.

All your family members should be aware of the storage location of the emergency kit. Similarly, for your workplace, you should designate a spot for keeping the emergency kit.

Conclusion

So, these were some of the inputs about the importance of having an earthquake kit, the top most kits in different categories, and their utilities in different situations.

We suggest that before finalizing the earthquake kit, you can sit together with your family members & even your neighborhood friends and decide on the items that each one of you would require in your earthquake kit.

You can even consider having a pool kit having all essentials according to the number of individuals. In addition, each one can have a small earthquake kit with only the essential items in it.

For full protection, check out this additional resource on hurricane preparedness to make sure you’re covered for any natural disaster that may come your way.

We hope our reviews would help you in selecting the most suitable earthquake preparedness kit(s) for your specific purpose.