What to
Include in a Car Emergency Kit
Part 3 : Your First Aid Kit and
Other Considerations
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A professional first aid
kit should be in a green colored container with a white
cross on its exterior.
This is part three of a three
part series on creating an in-car emergency kit. Please also visit
1.
How to Decide What to Include in Your Emergency Kit 2.
Four Emergency Kit Checklists
3. Your First Aid Kit
and Other Considerations
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There's no limit to how serious
a medical problem you might encounter while in your car.
We all know about fatal and very
serious car crashes, and while you probably don't have the first
aid training or the specialized equipment to be able to assist a seriously injured crash
victim, you do need to have a realistic collection of first aid
items so as to be able to respond to less serious medical
problems.
Starting with a prepackaged
kit and adding some extra items might be a good approach to
building a truly useful first aid kit.
Lastly in this final part of
our three part series, we offer some closing thoughts on other
miscellaneous aspects of your car emergency kit and situations
where you might need to use it.
What to Keep in Your First Aid
Kit
You can easily buy prepackaged
first aid kits, and you'll see them advertised everywhere,
sometimes boasting of having many hundreds of different items
included.
But when you look at the list
of the 500 or however many items included in the super special kit, you'll
probably find
that 490 of them are small sized bandaid plasters.
Don't shop based on number of
items included. Shop based on the actual contents of the
kit, and consider adding extra items to whatever comes as
standard (or building your own kit from scratch). It is
unlikely you'll ever end up with too much in a first aid kit, but
it is possible you might find yourself with not enough.
First aid kits are worthy of
the same considerations for what to include and exclude as is the
overall emergency kit as a whole, and again involve the issue of
where to stop adding extra things for extra eventualities, and a
similar formula to what you should first include and what is least
necessary, as detailed in the first
part of this series.
As well as using the same
formula for priotizing your inclusions, you also should consider any special
needs you and your family members might have, and your level
of first aid competence.
The more competent you are,
the more extensive you should make your kit, especially if you'll
be traveling to remote areas.
The First Aid Bag Itself
You should keep everything in
a green bag, ideally with a white cross on the outside. and
hopefully moderately waterproof. This
is the international standard for a first aid bag (yes, there is
an ISO standard for first aid bags), which means
that if you are incapacitated, anyone else may quickly recognize
the bag as possibly containing life saving equipment to help them
save you.
This is also a good way of
testing the amount of thought and care that has gone into the
creation of commercially prepackaged kits. If they are not
in a green bag, they are not nearly as credible a product as if
they are.
Short Shelf Life of Some First
Aid Items
First aid kits that are stored
in vehicles are going to be in harsher conditions than if stored
in your bathroom medicine cabinet. In summer, they might
suffer temperatures above 100°, and in winter, they could be
way below freezing.
This means that temperature
sensitive products will have a shorter shelf life in your vehicle
than they would in your home, so be sure to replace such things
regularly. Plasters and gloves and other inert things are
relatively impervious to such environmental factors, but chemical
solutions such as burn creams, medications, etc, are going to be
impacted.
One approach to this is to
keep such things for a limited time in your car kit, then rather
than throwing them away and replacing them, take them from your
car kit and put them into your at home or in office kit instead,
giving them some years of extra life in a kinder situation before
finally discarding them.
Medicines Have Longer Effective
Lives Than Claimed
As an interesting aside,
reputable studies suggest that most medications, if stored well,
have effective lives as much as ten years longer than the expiry
dates printed on them (notable exceptions being insulin, liquid
suspension antibiotics and nitroglycerin).
So we'd suggest
keeping items for half to two thirds of their official shelf life
in the extreme conditions of your car, then for maybe another five
years in a more friendly environment at home.
Items For Your In-Car Emergency
First Aid Kit
Here are suggestions of items to
include in your first aid kit :
-
Antiseptic cleaning wipes
and sprays
-
Bandaid type adhesive
bandages of assorted shapes and sizes
-
Dressings of various
sizes/shapes
-
A roll of gauze
-
Tape
-
Safety Pins
-
Quick clot dressings
-
Gloves
-
Insect sting relief
-
Burn cream
-
Topical painkiller (if not
in burn cream and/or antiseptic spray)
-
Eyewash and eye cup
-
Aspirin
-
Anti-diarrhea tablets
-
Anti-histamine
-
Tweezers
-
Scissors
-
Magnifying glass
-
LED Flashlight (if not
elsewhere included)
-
Emergency blanket (if not
elsewhere included)
-
Waterproof matches or
lighter (if not elsewhere included)
-
First Aid book(let)
-
Special meds you/your
family might need
Don't Rely on Your Emergency Kit
in Non-Emergencies
A problem can arise when you
start relying on the contents of your emergency kit and modify
your behavior such that you start regularly using emergency items.
The most obvious example of
that is if you carry spare gas. If you know you've got 5
gallons of gas in the trunk, giving you 100+ miles of extra
driving range, maybe you'll start deliberately driving the car
closer down to empty, making it more likely that you'll need the
emergency gas.
This is maybe okay for driving
around town, but if you're in a remote part of the countryside,
you need to keep the spare gas for a real emergency, not just for
convenience (and, in truth, how convenient is it anyway to run out
of gas, and to then have to pour the gas from the container into
your tank) on the side of the road.
Keep your car in good
condition, and don't rely on the spare gas, spare washer fluid,
etc.
Battery, Climate and Gas Issues
if Stuck
If something occurs that
results in your being stuck in your car for an extended time, you
need to consider several things.
Battery management
The first is that if you have
the radio on, and maybe interior lights on, too, and possibly
external hazard flashers on, you're going to be draining the car's
battery. You don't want to run your battery flat and then be
unable to start your car subsequently.
So every so often, if you can,
you'll want to run the engine to charge the battery for a while.
Assuming you're not running low on gas, we suggest that you run
the engine perhaps every 30 minutes, and for five minutes, with
the car on a slightly faster than normal idle (so as to ensure the
alternator is charging at maximum rate).
Climate Issues
If it is very cold outside,
you'll of course want to wrap up in as much warm clothing and
blankets as possible.
Run the car's engine and
heating system infrequently to bring some heat into the car.
But you'll probably need to do this for at least five minutes at a
time, both to recharge the battery from the drain on starting the
engine and to give the engine time to heat up so that it can start to
efficiently transfer heat into the vehicle.
When you're heating up the
car interior, you might want to have the heater set on recirculate
for the first few minutes, and then switch to bringing in external
air once the engine is hot and better able to heat up colder air
so as to change out the air in the passenger compartment and
ensure you keep a good supply of oxygen inside.
Remember it is harder to heat
yourself up again (or to cool down again) if you get too hot or
too cold to start with, so as long as you can, attempt to keep
yourself close to a comfortable temperature by the appropriate use
of clothing and car climate controls.
Running the Engine - Carbon
Monoxide
If you're simply parked by the
side of the road, there are probably no safety concerns when
running your engine. But if you're strangely stuck in a
confined enclosed space like your garage at home (we've no idea
how this could occur!) then you don't want to run your engine
because of the carbon monoxide exhaust.
Carbon monoxide is
colorless and tasteless and lethal - it can and will kill you if
you ingest too much of it.
If you're stuck in a snow
drift or something like that, make sure your exhaust pipe isn't
blocked.
Gas Issues
If you are running low on gas,
simply turn off interior lights, the radio, and anything else
using electricity. Your battery should not now have any
drain on it and can last for days with no problems.
If you need (or want) to
monitor the radio for information about your situation, simply
turn it on occasionally and for brief periods, and with lower
rather than loud volume.
However, it is better to be
rescued, alive and comfortable, with a nearly empty gas tank than
it is to be found, dead from exposure, with a full gas tank.
So use your gas wisely, but do use it as necessary.
The Survival Rule of Threes
Here's a quick easy thing to
remember. A person can go three weeks without food, three
days without water, and three hours without shelter.
In any extreme situation, your
first priority is to keep warm. When you have created
suitable shelter, then your next priority is a supply of water
(ideally a gallon a day per person, but you can manage with much
less), and only when you have water secured, then you switch your
focus to a food supply.
For a bonus, here's a strategy
for getting the most from your food. In an open ended
situation where rescue is an unknown number of days into the future, you
should eat half your food normally. Then you should eat half
the remaining food at half ration rates. Then half the
remaining food at quarter ration rates, and the balance at one
eighth ration rates.
Part of a three-part series
This is part three of a three
part series on creating an in-car emergency kit. Please also visit
1.
How to Decide What to Include in Your Emergency Kit 2.
Four Emergency Kit Checklists
3. Your First Aid Kit
and Other Considerations
Related Articles, etc
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Originally published
27 April 2012, last update
30 May 2021
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
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