Actually, some shelters now take dogs and other pets...Check with the local Red Cross.

article here

While I agree that the shelter is less desirable (mostly on the grounds of if they are going to whine about my EDC Swiss army knife, I wonder what they'll say about some of my other EDC items), there are times when they are the best or even only choice. The four that come to mind real fast are
-Travelling, you don't have your real BoB with you and because your BoL is even further away. You are a refugee
-Chemical or radiation threat, you need to decontaminate.
-You are on foot, and the weather is such that you run a high risk of an exposure injury if you try to overnight in an bushcraft shelter or a tent.
-Due to injury or illness, you are not very mobile. (Me right now- if I tried to walk 15 miles from office to home, I'd have a sock full of blood and be ready to pass out from pain.)

The biggest thing I can think to take into a shelter is an ally- friend, family member, someone who you can shift sleep with and can watch your back.

I operate shelters for the local Red Cross chapter, just to clarify a few things:

- not all shelters are Red Cross, here anyway local communities (city governments) have built up the capacity to shelter local residents. They pre-locate cots and blankets and other resources, and city employees train to run the shelter, many of them receiving training from Red Cross. You can't have a Red Cross shelter everywhere, and our local volunteer base virtually guarantees that we can't open more than 3 concurrent shelters in our county; in a large disaster we'll work with cities and county emergency management to open larger venues as shelters, with a call to our cavalry - the national Red Cross - to bring more supplies and volunteers to address actual needs, arriving within 24 to 72 hours.

- everyone learned from Katrina, and nowadays we all have procedures for your pets. In King County it involves parallel pet shelters adjacent to human shelters, where you check them in and they are cared for my local volunteers (Humane Society etc), under supervision of some excellent veterinarians. Then you proceed to the human shelter and check in yourself and your family there. On smaller shelters we can have your pets sheltered by the local Humane Society or other pet shelters until you are restored to your pre-disaster status. Its no big thing from our perspective, because there are enough people who love animals to make this happen - just like there are enough people who love people to make human shelters possible. And its acceptable to us if you opt to keep your pets in your car and register to stay in the human shelter. Sometimes folks will sleep in their car with their pets - companionship goes a long way in any disaster. We'll provide blankets for you, if we can spare them.

- your local community shelter rules may vary. All however have a no weapons policy, guaranteed. At the Red Cross shelter we have a strict policy of no weapons inside the shelter, and we advise folks to stash them in their cars. Cities may take the same stance, although I participated in a city-run shelter exercise where they offered the local sheriff to catalog and store weapons instead of requiring folks to stash them somewhere themselves - still, I have to wonder if the sheriff is really ready to handle securing weapons, that might have just been the bright idea of some local exercise operator. YMMV. No shelter can tolerate weapons in an environment where people are displaced and distressed, and increasingly prone to violence. Safety of shelter clients is our highest priority. I can guarantee that anyone brandishing a weapon in a shelter will receive suitable accommodations of the iron bar kind. The Red Cross hasn't solved this problem of weapons possession, which is a pretty common conundrum in large and random public interactions - we won't solve it to your satisfaction to carry weapons into the shelter under our control anyway.

- if you need to decontaminate then a shelter is not for you; in response to a chemical or radiation exposure, local officials will run decontamination stations, and you should get in line there. If we open shelters in response to chemical or radiation exposure, they will be well-outside the contamination zone and additional scrutiny will be applied to screen for contamination. We have the safety of shelter clients as our highest priority.

- otherwise, weather, injuries, incapacities both mental and physical, being alone or displaced, all good reasons to take shelter. A shelter is what it says - shelter from the storm or disaster. Shelters also provide food for those who don't want to sleep there, as well as showers if they are available. They are a resource for people impacted by disasters much like anything else, you can take them or leave them. If you're trying to get from point A to point B and can't make it on your own, I would rate a shelter as an excellent rally point for assistance - there may not be anything set up formally in the initial hours or days, but your request for transportation can be relayed along and meantime we can initiate safe and well contacts with your loved ones who are looking for you and you may be hoping to rejoin. The Red Cross almost always has a comms capacity, and as available we use it to connect our clients with their loved ones.

- the list of recommended stuff to take into a shelter is pretty good, and matches up pretty well with the things Red Cross folks are recommended to take with them on 2-3 week disaster deployments - often RC volunteers sleep in staff shelters or even in the same shelters as their clients. EDIT: don't forget your meds, prescription and otherwise. The legal kinds can be taken into shelters, illegal ones I would not recommend unless you are comfortable with being relocated by the cops to a more appropriate shelter. At the Red Cross we should have health services staff who can help you recover necessary prescriptions and medical devices, typically free of charge or costing you the deductible you would typically pay. One thing I can recommend is a sleeping bag liner, the type you can buy at REI, they're made of silk or polyester and they give an element of warmth, but not as much as a full sleeping bag. Very nice if you arrive somewhere and there are no blankets available until morning, or you have 7 hours to wait at the airport for a red eye to your destination, you can crawl in and sleep comfortably. Liners roll up to the size of a pair of (wool) socks. Easily multi-use, reusable, and $30-65 dollars at REI.

- Most shelter won't check your baggage either in terms of security or in terms of a coat check: we're not responsible for your belongings, so make sure that you keep an eye on them yourself, and never leave anything unattended that you can't go on without.

Thank you, Lono - a most informative post. One quick question - what constitutes a weapon? Obviously firearms would be barred, but what about edged tools? Specifically, I am not fully dressed until I put my Leatherman Wave on my belt. Could I bring that or similar into your shelter?

Most places like that consider even small knives to be 'weapons'. Hence people like airlines, TSA, schools, .gov, etc all banning any knives.

Less than $1000 and some watching your local craigslist you can have a mobile shelter and just take yourself and any 'weapons' along with you.

Which is why, for me, the no weapons policy is NOT acceptable. With respect to the forum rules, I will not continue further down this string of logic.

Lono, thanks for the detailed info on shelters. It is nice to hear from someone who actually has extensive experience with the topic.

As I noted upthread, different situations require different responses. Certainly most of us on this forum would prefer to think we can be self reliant in all situations. However I suspect that even the most adamant "I won't ever go to a shelter, never" folks might find that a Red Cross or other shelter starts looking pretty good when faced with some situations.

Agreed. My views are based on expected situations for my particular area. If I were along the coast or farther southwest or west of here, I'd have to figure on hurricanes, tornadoes, and more than micro area flooding. Our usual threats are relatively minor compared to the rest of the country. Even moving across the county would require a change of viewpoint. The terrain in a particular area over there causes a wind funnel effect. They get many more occurrences of tornadoes and straight line winds.

I would have to look up what the formal weapons policy is for the Red Cross, but mostly its guns and knives, and those are 99% of the weapons encountered at registration. Other forms of weaponry is rightly in the eye of the beholder and a practical decision is made - if a person came in carrying a scythe or a sickle, you'd probably ask him to keep them in their car. I imagine we'd do the same for pepper spray as well. Like the TSA, a Leatherman with an edged blade option would probably be prohibited as well. Like I said, we deal with practicalities, and no weapons means nothing that can be used to harm another shelter client or yourself.

To me, entering a shelter to sleep is highly situational. I travel a lot domestically and internationally, and I don't pretend I can make it home from Munich to Seattle in a short period, short of an embassy evacuation; or from St Louis for that matter. My resources are occasionally more scarce than I want them to be. My best bet is to exploit my employer resources, which are pretty darn good in terms of getting me out of strange places. But I don't worry about entering a shelter either, maybe because I've run enough of them to know what to expect. Shelters are populated by the community of people displaced by a disaster, and they bring every bit of character and problems in with them. At one end there are alcoholics and drug addicts, people with mental health issues. There are a lot of good people who are thoroughly displaced, with no place else to go. We see a lot of families and elderly, and people with functional needs that must be addressed. We see a fair number from immigrant populations as well, because despite having friends and family, they lack the resources for self-sufficiency due to poverty. Poverty is a great equalizer no matter where you're from or who you know. Bottom line, everyone deserves shelter, that what the Red Cross does - you can be denied shelter or services only if you act out and violate the rules. And most often I see that as the rare exception.

Even if you never would sleep in a shelter, I would consider it as a preparedness resource - Red Cross distributes food and water and showers and laundry and counseling and communication beyond the scope of the disaster and all sorts of stuff, both to those in the shelter and also to those who would never step foot inside. Don't rule them out - you never know when you may be in the path of the tornado.

Always having family and friends to bond together with to ride out a disaster aftermath is a worthy goal for everyone on this list, because it seems to be an order of magnitude more difficult on your own.