Portuguese app turns EU emergency-kit advice into a household checklist
K72 tracks a 45-item evacuation backpack and warns when supplies expire, the state supplies the interface while citizens pack the first 72 hours
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New K72 app helps Portuguese prepare 72-hour emergency kits for disasters
euronews.com
A new Portuguese app walks households through packing for the first 72 hours of a disaster. K72 was built by Carlos Batista — a documentary filmmaker, director of photography and drone operator who also coordinates Montijo's local civil protection unit — together with the town's Municipal Civil Protection Service. The European Commission recommends precisely such a kit: provisions for the three days before organised help arrives.
The app divides preparedness into backpacks for different scenarios — sheltering at home, evacuation, the car, pets. The evacuation pack lists 45 items: shelter and cover, water filters and purification tablets, food, fire, cutting tools, rope, hygiene, medication, personal documents, navigation, a portable power station, and a kit for the Meshcore network, a radio system that keeps working when mobile networks fail. Users mark what they already own and what is still missing, and the app tracks the stock, warning when food and medicines approach their expiry dates. It also drafts a family emergency plan — how to contact each other, where to meet, who needs help — and carries civil protection alerts alongside short instructions for urban fires, toxic gases, earthquakes, heatwaves, cold snaps and prolonged power and water outages.
Batista says the idea was to build a tool that 'would not just inform, but push people to take action'. André Morais, who coordinates Montijo's civil protection service, wants the app to start a conversation at home: if an emergency happens, do we know what to do, how do we contact each other, where do we meet, who needs help. The first 72 hours are, in the Commission's framing, the most critical phase of an emergency — the phase before the organised response reaches anyone. The state supplies the interface; the household supplies the three days.
Users who cannot find an item are redirected to an example in an online shop.