Be ready for disaster was my motto for twenty years, because being ready for disaster was my job. My team designed and built a duplicate computer room intended to run an entire company if the machines at head office were damaged or destroyed.
During those years we were hit by a couple of medium-sized earthquakes and a fire that came close to the building. What struck me was how few people around me had any idea how to respond to either one. Computers are worthless without the people who run them, and the people who ran mine did not know what to do.
So I took CERT-LA, a seven-day course run by the Los Angeles Fire Department. Community Emergency Response Team. It was one of the best educational experiences of my life and I took it twice to get everything out of it.
Then I asked a teammate what he would do if an earthquake started right then. He said he would get under the window.
The correct answer is a heavy table or a desk, because the point is to protect your body from falling objects. Getting under a window is close to the worst available option, since the glass comes down on top of you. He did not hesitate and he was not stupid. Nobody had ever told him.
What qualifies the author to write a survival guide?
Twenty years of doing it professionally, and the training on top.
I ran disaster recovery for a major national retailer for two decades. That work is a detailed and continuous study of emergencies. How you prepare, how you respond, and how you recover afterward, tested by drills instead of by opinion.
Add the CERT course twice, courses at disaster recovery conferences, dozens of books, and a lot of exercises where somebody is watching to see whether the plan holds.
None of that is heroic. It is the ordinary background of somebody whose job was to assume the building might not be there tomorrow.
The book on this: Real World Survival is a family survival guide built from twenty years of running corporate disaster recovery, updated after a pandemic and two hurricanes.
Why did Real World Survival need a new edition?
Because ten years produced a decade of examples nobody had.
A global pandemic shut down entire countries. Supply chains collapsed overnight. Infrastructure failed in ways that were not on anybody’s list. Critical systems came under cyber attack.
The pandemic taught a lesson worth having. Empty shelves are not a distant problem that happens somewhere else. One day you buy toilet paper without thinking about it and the next day people are fighting over the last package.
The disasters between 2015 and 2025 demonstrated that an interconnected world is considerably more fragile than most people assume.
What did the hurricanes teach the author?
That preparation and knowledge do not exempt you.
I lived through Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Milton, and both showed me how fast modern infrastructure comes apart under pressure. Cell towers go down. Gas stations run dry. Grocery stores close for weeks instead of days.
Those storms tested everything I thought I knew about disaster response, and some of it did not survive the test. The lessons that came out of them were not in my original playbook.
The warning I would give alongside that is the one people ignore. Recent disasters create false confidence. The next emergency will not resemble the last one, and preparing precisely for the storm you just survived is a way of being unprepared for whatever comes instead.
What disasters has the author been in?
Four, and they open the book because a survival guide should say where its author has been.
Christmas Day 1986. My father decided we would take a hike. Warm, beautiful, snow still on the ground from a storm the week before. We left at seven expecting to be back by noon. Our front yard bordered the south side of the San Bernardino Mountains, and just past Route 18 there was a drop of several thousand feet with a small canyon winding down it.
We climbed down a two hundred foot shale cliff and found a hidden waterfall with a deep pool shaded by cliffs and trees. One of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We stayed a while and carried on down the riverbed.
Noon came and went. Everything that went wrong that day started with a view worth stopping for.
What happened on the mountain road?
I was commuting down it when the sides of the road caught fire.
I drove from Lake Arrowhead to college in San Bernardino every weekday on a long twisty road, and I loved that drive. Trees, streams, animals, entirely relaxing.
One hot summer day I realised the trees and shrubs were burning on both sides of me. I looked back and the fire had jumped the road behind me. I could not go that way. Everywhere I looked there was fire.
That is a specific kind of moment and I have written about it elsewhere. What it taught me is in this book, and the short version is that the exit you planned on is one of the things a disaster removes first.
Why did the author spend two years in the desert?
Because my wife died of lung disease and I could not sit still afterward.
For two years I visited a different scenic place in the American Southwest every single weekend. I put more than a hundred thousand miles on the car doing it, trying to keep my sanity after losing the person who was also my best friend.
On one of those weekends I went for a long hike in Joshua Tree. I believed I was prepared. A vest with pockets full of supplies, enough water for the day, more than enough food, and I had told the ranger where I was going.
The flash flood chapter is what happened next, and the lesson underneath it is that preparation reduces your exposure and does not eliminate it.
What was the Northridge earthquake like?
It started as a low rumble and a gentle shake, and then it was not gentle.
My eyes snapped open and I sat straight up. A few seconds later the whole room swayed side to side for what felt like a very long time. I pushed my wife out of the bed onto the floor and watched the furniture come alive.
The kitchen table slid six feet as though something had hold of it. The bookshelves rocked back and forth like drunks.
That is the experience the survival advice is trying to prepare somebody for, and it is why the man who said he would get under a window stayed in my head. Nothing in that room gave anybody time to reason it out.
Can you depend on help arriving?
The first chapter is that question and Katrina is the answer.
In August 2005 a Category Five hurricane struck the Gulf Coast and killed more than eighteen hundred people, with thousands more missing. A large part of New Orleans sits below sea level, and when the levees failed much of the city flooded.
Government agencies at every level, local, state and federal, were involved. The question the chapter asks is not whether anybody tried. It is how long it took and what people did in the meantime.
That chapter comes first for a structural reason. Every other chapter in the book assumes an answer to it, and most people have never worked out what theirs is.
What does Real World Survival cover?
The whole picture, not the bag.
The original book was about building a go bag. This one keeps that chapter and puts it in context, because a bag is one component of a plan and most people buy the bag instead of making the plan.
Four parts. Foundations, including who you can depend on, situational awareness, the types of modern disaster, and how early warning information reaches you. Home preparation, covering water, food, power and supplies. Response equipment, including the go bag, medical readiness, and communications. Then the mindset and the long term.
The chapter on who you can depend on comes first deliberately. Every other chapter assumes an answer to it.
Who is Real World Survival for?
People who are not preppers and are not planning to become preppers.
The subtitle is the complete family survival guide, and the audience is somebody with a household, a job, and no interest in a bunker. The material is about the emergencies that arrive: storms, fires, earthquakes, outages, and weeks where the normal supply of things simply stops.
I hope nobody reading it ever needs it. The time to prepare is while the lights are still on and the stores are still stocked, which is the one window that closes without warning.
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