Giving and maintaining emergency kits for the holiday gift season

My kind-of annual post below, with a few changes. I've found that emergency kits make highly-appreciated gifts for friends and relatives, one of those things that are on everyone's to-do list but often don't get done. If the entire kit's too expensive, you can just give a car kit, or get a part (I suggest water and water purification) and upgrade over time.

If people have had kits for a few years then it's also time to consider replacing out the food. If you or someone you know uses camping food, you might switch out the old with the new a year or two before expiration, so you can use the food before it expires.

Easy-but-not-cheap 72-hour emergency kits for home, with purchase links

There are nine members of my wife's family in the Bay Area, and when I found out no one had the 72-hour emergency kits we're supposed to have, I put them together as presents (in-laws loved the kits, too). My emphases were making them easy for me to put together, easy for people with no camping experience to use, and ones that would last as many years as possible without needing replacement or maintenance. In return I was willing to pay more, be more bulky than the minimum possible, and have limited control over food selection.

72-Hour Home kits:

• Water in plastic jugs, 3 gallons/person
• Chlorine dioxide water-purification pills (purifies 7 gallons) in case water goes bad (after 6 months, assume the water's bad), in case it's leaked away, or in case you need more water.
• Mountain House 72-Hour Emergency Meal Kit, 1 per person
• Mountain Oven Flameless Heating Kit: each kit can be used 5 times and can prepare 2 meals at a time. So 2 kits per two people in a household, but also 2 kits in a single-person household.
• Plastic silverware
• Emergency phone numbers/contact list

The above is the absolute minimum. Meals can be eaten in their pouches, so no dishes are needed. Flameless heating kits eliminate the need for cooking stoves (water has to be purified, though). Emergency meals also can be eaten with cold (purified) water although they taste bad. The food and flameless kits should be good for at least 3 or 4 years, and probably more than twice that long.

In earthquake country, your kit should be stored outside your home in case you can't get inside. So in your yard, your car, or somewhere else. The only maintenance this requires is to simply look every six months to see if the water's leaked through the seams of the plastic jugs - it happens fairly often.

Additional useful items:

• Cheap flashlight/headlamp
• Spare batteries in clear plastic bag so you can see if they've become corroded over time
• Plastic tarp and cord as a rain shelter
• Swiss Army knife
• Emergency shelter, 1 per adult
• Cheap or expensive first aid kit (I went with cheap kits from the local drugstore)
• Cheap rain gear, spare shoes and clothes
• Hand-crank radio/flashlight combination

Don't let the extras delay you from putting together the minimum.

I also made better-than-nothing emergency kits for everyone's car, in case you're stuck on the road:

Car kits:

• Liter water bottle per person (enough to keep you hydrated for a few hours until you can find a water source)
• Water purification tablets (can disinfect murky water from ditches, and you might need to) 
• Emergency shelter
• Small amount of long-lasting food (I found tins of honey-roasted peanuts that were good for four years)
• Cheap rain poncho
• Emergency contact list
• Shoes you can walk many miles in, if that's not what you normally wear
• Cheap, tiny flashlight
• wool blanket (additional warmth, or traction under a spinning wheel in the mud or snow)

You can do much better than this car kit, but it's something in case destroyed roads/bridges keep you from getting home for 12-24 hours.

Additional tricks for both kits: put the contact lists in their own ziplock plastic bags to reduce the chance that they'll mold/get wet over the years.

Hopefully this is all unnecessary.

Lots of great comments here, and a resource link at Making Light. UPDATE:  and see the comments below.