When I was a teenager growing up in North Dakota, we had one of those famous ‘blizzards of the century’. We got so much snow we couldn’t open our front door because the snow was piled so high. The street in front of our house was impassible and there was no traffic what so ever. Worse yet, our family was running out of food and our pantry was bare. So my father decided it was time to replenish our food supply and walk to the nearest grocery store, which was located about a mile from our home. His strategy was to pull a toboggan to the store, put the groceries on it and pull everything back to our home. Well, we got to the store by walking down the middle of the deserted streets, pulling the toboggan, loaded up our groceries and headed back to our house. The trip back to our home was not fun. The grocery bags kept falling off of the toboggan and we had to stop and reposition the bags again and again. My father, who was not in the best shape of his life kept falling behind as my brother and I kept taking turns pulling the toboggan. Eventually, we made it back home, however my exhausted father was not okay. He was sick from the excursion and it took him a week to recover from his sickness.

Lesson learned here? Being unprepared for any disaster that may require you and/or your family to shelter in your home for more than a day could mean risking a family member’s health or safety. Which is why many years later, my current family will never be caught without at least three days of food, water, and shelter items. That is why I encourage every family to have a shelter in place plan in place, with a minimum of three days of survival food, water and shelter items in place. Every family, needs to have a shelter in place plan just in case the next blizzard, power outage, hurricane, and dozens of other shelter at home events might occur.

Need more proof that your family might need a shelter in place plan? Check out these statistics from recent news headlines:

• Only 12% of families have adequate emergency supplies.
• 52% of consumers who experienced a disaster said they weren’t as prepared as they could have been.
• “25,000 home without power!”
• “Millions stuck in another day of frigid darkness!”
• “After the power outage, water runs short.”