A Typhoon Kit for a Southeast Asian Apartment (What to Have)
Nearly every storm preparation list in English assumes a detached house with a garage, a car, and a supermarket you drive to. Plywood for the windows. A generator. Sandbags.
None of that applies to a fifteenth-floor apartment in Manila or Hanoi, where you cannot board the windows, cannot run a generator, and the shop is downstairs. The failure modes are different, and so the kit is different.
What actually fails in an apartment
Start from the failures rather than from a list, because the list falls out of them.
Power goes, and with it the lift and the water. This is the one people underestimate. Most mid- and high-rise buildings in the region pump water to a roof tank. No power, no pump, and within a day the tank is empty. You lose water some hours after you lose electricity, which feels like a second, separate disaster and is in fact the same one. This site has a piece on how long power actually stays out after a typhoon and why the last stretch takes weeks, and everything in that applies more sharply above the fourth floor.
The lift stops. On a low floor this is an inconvenience. On the twentieth it redefines the week: you are not going down for supplies and coming back up repeatedly.
Mobile networks degrade before they fail. Base stations run on battery for a period and then go. Data usually goes before voice and SMS.
Windows are the structural risk and you cannot modify them. Renting means no boarding, no shutters and often no permission to do anything permanent.
The shop downstairs closes and stays closed. Not for the hours of the storm — for the day, and sometimes the day after.
Checklist one: the kit, in priority order
Ordered by what you regret not having, not by category.
- Water, stored before the storm. Fill the bath, buckets, the kettle, every bottle you own. Drinking water separately — allow several litres per person per day for three days. This is the single highest-value item and it costs nothing if done in advance.
- A power bank, charged, and ideally two. Enough to keep a phone alive for three days without mains. Charge everything the moment a signal goes up rather than when the power flickers.
- Light that is not a candle. A head torch and a lantern. Candles in a sealed apartment with no ventilation and possibly a gas leak downstairs are a genuinely bad idea, and they are what people default to.
- Food that needs no cooking and no refrigeration. Bread, tinned fish, peanut butter, instant noodles only if you have a gas ring. Three days.
- Cash in small notes. Card terminals and ATMs go with the power and the network. Small notes because nobody will have change.
- A radio, or an offline plan for information. When data goes, a battery radio is the fallback. Failing that, download the forecast pages before it happens.
- Tape for the windows, and a decision about which room to be in. Tape does not stop glass breaking; it changes how it breaks. This site covers the argument about taping windows and why the practice persists in detail.
- Medication, a fortnight ahead. Pharmacies close and restocking is slow.
- A charged laptop as a second battery. It will charge a phone several times over.
- Documents photographed and stored offline. Passport, visa, insurance, lease. On the phone, not in the cloud.
Checklist two: the sequence, by warning level
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| Start of the season | Buy the torch, power bank and radio once. Find out which floor the water tank serves and where the building's generator, if any, actually reaches. |
| A system is 3–5 days out | Refill medication. Draw cash. Nothing else — it is too early and the track will move. |
| 48 hours out / first signal | Shop now. This is the window before the shelves empty. Charge everything. |
| 24 hours out | Fill every water container. Move anything valuable away from windows. Photograph the apartment for insurance. |
| 12 hours out | Tape windows if you are going to. Choose the interior room. Bring in anything on a balcony — it becomes a projectile. |
| During | Stay away from the glass. Do not use the lift. Do not go out to look. |
| Immediately after | Do not assume it is over. If the eye passes over, the second half arrives from the opposite direction. |
| Day after | Ration water until the pump is confirmed running. Check on neighbours on higher floors. |
This page contains no computed data table. The two checklists above are the original material; they are built from the failure modes described in this site’s reporting on power restoration, warning systems and building services in the region rather than from a public dataset. Nothing here replaces instructions from your local authority or building management.
The forty-eight hours after, which nobody prepares for
Preparation writing stops when the wind stops. In an apartment the harder part usually starts there.
The lift is the first problem and it is the one that structures everything else. Buildings do not restore lifts the moment mains power returns; there is an inspection, and on a block with several lifts they come back one at a time. On a high floor this means the stairwell is your only route for a day or more, and every litre of water and every bag of food comes up it by hand. That is the real argument for storing water in advance rather than planning to buy it afterwards.
The second problem is the tank. Even once the pump runs again, a drained rooftop tank refills slowly and the upper floors are last to get pressure back. It is normal for the lower half of a building to have water while the upper half does not, and for that to persist for most of a day.
The third is the fridge, and it is the one that causes illness rather than inconvenience. A closed fridge holds for several hours and a closed freezer for a day or so; opening either repeatedly to check destroys that margin. The rule is to decide once, early, what is being eaten and what is being thrown out, and then leave the door shut.
Then there is the building itself. Corridors and stairwells flood from wind-driven rain coming in through vents and lift lobbies, lights fail, and the stairs are dark and wet at exactly the point you need to use them. A head torch is worth more in the aftermath than during.
And finally, the queue. Everyone in the building wants water, cash and a working network at the same moment, and the shop downstairs restocks on a truck that is competing with every other shop in the city. Being an hour ahead of that queue is worth more than being well equipped for it.
What not to bother with
A short list, because bad advice costs money and space.
A generator is not usable in most apartments — no ventilation, no legal place to run it, and carbon monoxide is the actual risk rather than a theoretical one.
Sandbags are for ground floors and basements. Above the second floor they solve nothing.
Plywood cannot be fitted to most rented apartment windows and there is nowhere to store it.
Enormous food stockpiles are the wrong shape of preparation. Three days of no-cook food is the useful quantity; a fortnight of rice you cannot cook without power is not.
A full bathtub as drinking water is a common confusion. Bath water is for flushing and washing. Drinking water is separate and bottled.
Buying everything the day before is the habit that undoes all of the above. The shelves that matter — bottled water, batteries, bread — empty a full day ahead of the shelves people expect to empty, and by the evening before landfall the useful items are gone while the shop still looks stocked.
The building, not the apartment
The last thing worth doing is the one nobody does, and it takes ten minutes at the start of a season.
Find out three facts about your building: whether there is a backup generator and what it powers (usually the lift and corridor lights, rarely the apartments), where the water tank is and roughly how long it lasts with no pump, and whether the management has a plan and a way of telling you about it. In many buildings the answers are reassuring and in some they are not, and either way it changes what you need to hold yourself.
Official preparation guidance for the Philippines is published by NDRRMC, and forecasts by PAGASA. Follow those over anything on this page where they differ.
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