If you've checked out the latest news recently its obvious that there is a lot of danger in this world right now. Hurricanes, power outages, tornadoes, blizzards, extreme heat and many, many more (actually 45 additional potential disaster types) can impact your family.

Do you think your family is safe from these potential disaster types? Never happen where you live? Think again! Here's an example: When I was a twenty-something father of two young daughters, I lived in a town that was two miles from a river that separated North Dakota from Minnesota. About ten o'clock at night my family (and my visiting brother-in-law's family) heard a knock on our door. We were all shocked to see three National Guard soldiers on our porch. "We are here to evacuate your family and you have ten minutes to gather what you can so we can take you to a shelter. That river had back up and breached a tributary that was now filling the street in and around our neighborhood. The Army truck in font of our house now had water over its tires and it was rising fast. Ten minutes! What do we grab? What do we take with us? What do we leave behind? What happens if we can't get back into our home for days or weeks or months?

Protecting your family is probably one of the most important things you can do. But a lot of families don't take the time or make the effort to take action. It's really quite easy to act. You just need to have two preparedness plans in place. The first preparedness plan to put in place (a shelter in place plan) is the easiest plan to create because 50-80% of what you need to prepare is already in your home. You can prepare this plan in an hour or two or at the most, within a day. If you don't have all of the items we suggest in creating a shelter in place, you can purchase or procure the other 20-50% that is missing within a day or two.

The second preparedness plan is the evacuation plan. It is more difficult to plan for this type of preparedness plan because you need to have answers to these types of questions:

  • Where are you going to evacuate to?
  • How will you get there?
  • What are you willing to leave behind at your home of dwelling?
  • What are the essential items you should take with you and what are the 'nice to have items'?
  • What if you will not be able to go back to your household or apartment for weeks, not days?
  • What financial, health and support resources will you still need access to, if you are not in your home for an extended period of time?

The answers to the above questions will take a little more time for a family to create its own personalized evacuation plan. That is why we recommend that you take our Evacuation Plan Tiny Course which will walk you through the steps to create a robust evacuation plan that your family can depend upon.

Craig Sobolik

I am an experienced and Certified Business Continuity Professional - (CBCP) whose career has been focused on helping some of corporate America's top businesses (think Fortune 1000 businesses) prepare for and manage disasters or threats to their businesses. My accolades include multiple awards for helping manage responses to such national events as the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Democratic National Convention in 2008 and managing a disaster preparedness program for UnitedHealth Group, a Fortune 6 company.

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