If someone in your home depends on powered medical equipment
Register with your utility now
Most utilities maintain a medical/special-needs registry — registered households may get advance notice of planned outages and are flagged in restoration planning. Call the number on your bill and ask for the medical-necessity or life-support registry. (Registration does not guarantee priority restoration — have a backup plan regardless.)
Know the federal resources
The HHS emPOWER program exists specifically for electricity-dependent medical equipment users; its resources help you and local emergency managers plan. Medicare users can be identified to responders in an emergency through it.
Plan the power itself
Ask the device's supplier about battery backup runtime and spares — oxygen concentrators, CPAP/BiPAP, home dialysis, and power wheelchairs all have documented options. If a generator is part of the plan, read our generator-safety guide first — CO kills the people generators were meant to protect.
During an outage
Check your area's restoration outlook early — the decision to relocate (family, a facility, a shelter with power) is easier made at hour one than hour six. If a device is failing and there's no immediate option, call 911; that is exactly what emergency services are for, per Ready.gov guidance.
Write the device plan down
One page, on the fridge: each device, its battery runtime, where spares/chargers live, the supplier's phone number, and the fallback location with power (family, friend, facility). The HHS emPOWER planning materials are built around exactly this kind of written plan — made before storm season, not during the outage.
Practice the switchover
Batteries that have never been used have a way of disappointing. Before storm season: run the device on its backup power briefly (per the manufacturer's instructions), confirm alarms and charge indicators are understood by everyone in the home, and date-check consumables. Set a calendar reminder to re-check each season.
Make yourself findable
Tell the people who'd check on you — neighbors, family, building management — that the home depends on powered equipment, and agree on a check-in trigger ("if the power's out more than an hour, call"). Dialing 211 reaches local resources (shelters with power, cooling/warming centers) in much of the US.
The kit, medical edition
Alongside the general outage kit, the medical version adds: a current written medication list (names, doses, prescriber), spare glasses or hearing-aid batteries, a cooler plan for refrigerated medication worked out with your pharmacist ahead of time, and — where the supplier offers one — the manual fallback for powered equipment (a manual wheelchair arrangement, a bag-valve alternative, whatever your device's documentation names). The Ready.gov kit checklists include these medical add-ons for a reason: they're the items you can't improvise at hour six.
In a long outage, escalate early
The pattern in after-action reports is consistent: households that moved early did better than households that waited to be sure. If runtime math says the battery dies before the lights return, act while you still have margin — 211 for shelters and medical-needs resources, your county emergency management for special-needs shelter registration, family with power for everything else. And the line from above bears repeating: a failing life-critical device with no options left is a 911 call, full stop.
Outages are exactly when scams circulate
During major events, fake "utility" calls demanding immediate payment to restore power spike. Utilities do not disconnect for nonpayment in the middle of restoring a storm outage, and they don't take gift cards — hang up and call the number on your bill if in doubt. The people most dependent on power are the most targeted; put this fact in the written plan too.
This page is planning info, not medical advice
Care decisions belong with your clinician and the device manufacturer. Our contribution is the outage side: live status, honest restoration estimates, and free alerts for your address.