The First 14 Days: Extend or Stand Down

The Manual’s Tier 1 is built to cover roughly this window, hours to 14 days. By the end of it, you should know which path you’re on, deliberately, not by a slow drift in either direction.

If things are resolving: begin recovery

Re-entry safety and insurance documentation come before cleanup. This is exactly what Recovery covers, along with a closing step worth doing even if everything’s genuinely fine now: re-running the household assessment once more.

If it’s continuing: transition deliberately into Tier 2

This isn’t just “keep doing Tier 1 longer.” It’s a real shift: from a stored buffer to an indefinite water plan (filtration and sourcing, not just what’s left in the barrels), from a temporary sanitation setup to a sustained one, and from rationing what you had to producing and sourcing more. Part 6: Running the Extended Plan covers what that shift actually looks like day to day; each manual chapter’s own Tier 2 section covers the specifics for that category.

Either way, redo the full assessment

Two weeks is long enough for the real situation, what you actually have left, what’s changed, what you learned the hard way, to have moved from whatever you assumed on day one. Don’t carry that first assumption forward unexamined.