I finally climbed out of that canyon at eight in the evening.
What guided me at the end was the sound of my mother and my sister at the top, walking the rim and calling our names. I came up breathless and had to explain to them, and to a fireman named Kurt, what had happened on the hike and what condition my father was in. Kurt went straight down.
That was Christmas 1986, and it is the thing I think about whenever somebody tells me they are reasonably well prepared.
What went wrong on an ordinary hike?
Nothing dramatic, which is the part worth paying attention to.
We were two people who had hiked before, on a day out, in country we thought we understood. There was no single catastrophic decision. There was a series of small ones, each defensible, that added up to being somewhere difficult with the light going and one of us unable to continue.
That is the shape of most emergencies I have seen since, professionally and otherwise. People imagine disasters as sudden events. Mostly they are ordinary situations that accumulate, and the moment you recognize it as an emergency is well after the moment it became one.
What did twenty years of disaster recovery add?
Confirmation that organizations fail exactly the way that hike did.
I was in charge of disaster recovery at Trader Joe’s for twenty years. Part of the job was understanding emergencies in detail: how to prepare, how to respond, how to recover afterwards. I took courses. I ran the scenarios.
What I found, over and over, was that the failures were almost never technical. Somebody assumed somebody else had it. The contact list was out of date. The plan existed and nobody had read it. The backup worked and no one had tested the restore.
Those are household failures wearing a corporate suit. The scale changes and the mechanism does not.
Why take a free course twice?
I did the CERT course in Los Angeles, then did it again to squeeze out every last bit of it.
The first pass is too full to hold. You are learning the vocabulary and the sequence at the same time, and a great deal goes past. The second time you already know the shape, so you can pay attention to the details, and the details are where the useful part is.
It was free then and it still is. I finished it so pleased with what I had learned that I decided to tell everybody, on the reasoning that knowing what to do in a disaster is potentially lifesaving and therefore everybody would want it.
They did not. That was an education of its own, and it is part of why I ended up writing the book. People do not resist preparedness because they disagree with it. They resist it because it requires imagining something they would rather not.
What should a household agree in advance?
Less equipment than people expect and more conversation.
Where you meet if you cannot get home. Where you meet if that place is unreachable. Who is responsible for collecting whom. What happens if the phones do not work, which is the most likely single failure and the one nobody plans around.
None of that costs anything. All of it has to be decided in advance, because the moment it becomes relevant is the moment nobody can think clearly. On that rim at eight in the evening, everything useful happened because my mother and sister were already looking and already calling. They had not been told to do that. It could easily have gone the other way.
How do you prepare for something you cannot predict?
By preparing for conditions instead of events.
You cannot anticipate whether it will be a fire, a storm, an earthquake or an accident on a walk. You can anticipate what all of those produce, which is a short and consistent list: no power, no communication, no access to somewhere you need to be, and people separated from each other.
Prepare for those four and the cause becomes largely irrelevant. That is also why the equipment question is less interesting than it looks. The torch matters, and it matters considerably less than everybody knowing where to go.
The book on this: Real World Survival is 240 pages on preparing a household for the bad day, from somebody who ran disaster recovery for twenty years and took the CERT course twice.
What would I tell somebody going out this weekend?
Tell one person where you are going and when you expect to be back. That single sentence is why my mother and sister were at the top of that canyon.
Assume the phone will not help. Signal, battery, water. Plan as though you have none of it.
Decide the meeting point before you need one. Out loud, to the people involved.
Take the free course. It is a weekend and it is genuinely lifesaving. Take it twice if you can.
Notice that it is becoming a problem earlier than you would like to. The hardest part is admitting an ordinary day has turned into something else, and everybody is late to it.
My father survived and Kurt is the reason. I have spent a lot of years since then working on systems that fail, and I have never found one that failed for a more interesting reason than the ones we managed on our own that afternoon.
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