Behind the Book: Real World Survival

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. Almost nobody 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 didn’t know what to do.

So I took CERT-LA, a seven-week course run by the Los Angeles Fire Department. Community Emergency Response Team. It was among 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’d do if an earthquake started right then. He said he’d get under the window. This was a man responsible for systems an entire company depended on.

The correct answer is a heavy table or a desk, because you’re protecting your body from falling objects. A window is close to the worst option available, since a sheet of glass comes down edge-first on whoever is under it.

He didn’t hesitate and he wasn’t stupid. He was a good engineer who would have been cut apart, and nobody had ever told him. That’s what got me. Not his answer. That in twenty years of fire drills nobody had spent the ninety seconds it takes to say get under the table.

What qualifies someone to write a survival guide?

Twenty years of doing it professionally, and the training on top of that.

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 it is heroic. It’s the ordinary background of a man whose job was to assume the building might not be there tomorrow. That was my job for twenty years.

Why did Real World Survival need a new edition?

Because ten years handed me a decade of examples I didn’t have the first time.

A global pandemic shut down entire countries. Supply chains collapsed overnight. Infrastructure failed in ways that weren’t on anybody’s list, including mine. Critical systems came under cyber attack.

The pandemic taught me something twenty years of professional planning hadn’t. Empty shelves aren’t a distant problem that happens somewhere else.

One day you buy toilet paper without thinking about it.

The next day grown adults are fighting each other over the last package in a shop, and the distance between those two days is about a week. I’d modeled supply chain failure on a whiteboard for two decades. I hadn’t understood that the failure arrives as your neighbors.

The disasters between 2015 and 2025 convinced me that an interconnected world is a great deal more fragile than most people assume.

What can you learn from Hurricanes Irma and Milton?

That preparation and knowledge don’t exempt you. They didn’t exempt me.

I lived through Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Milton, and both showed me how fast modern infrastructure comes apart under pressure. (See also where my survival books come from, on The Expert Method) 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 didn’t survive the test. The lessons that came out of them weren’t in my original playbook. Then there’s the warning people like least, and it’s the one they ignore most.

Surviving a disaster makes you worse at preparing for the next one. You now own a set of lessons from a storm that won’t repeat, and you’ll spend your money and attention refighting it. I’ve watched Floridians buy generators like crazy after every hurricane, then try to buy one before the next storm and find they’re sold out. The next emergency won’t look like the last one, and preparing exactly for the one you just survived is a way of being unprepared for whatever comes instead.

How many disasters has the author of Real World Survival lived through?

Four, and I open the book with them, because you should know where I’ve been before you take my advice about anything.

Christmas Day 1986, and my father decided we’d 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. Among the most beautiful places I’ve 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 I wanted to stop for.

What is it like to drive through a wildfire?

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 realized the trees and shrubs were burning on both sides of me. I looked back and the fire had jumped the road behind me. I couldn’t go that way. Everywhere I looked there was fire. That’s its own kind of moment and I’ve 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 Richard Lowe start taking long solo desert hikes?

Because my wife died of sepsis and I couldn’t sit still afterward.

For two years I drove to a different scenic place in the American Southwest every single weekend. More than a hundred thousand miles, and I photographed all of it. The driving and the photographs were the same thing. I’d lost the person who was also my best friend. I’m a loner by nature and I needed to be somewhere nobody was.

On one of those weekends I went for a long hike in Joshua Tree. I believed I was prepared, and I had every right to think so.

A vest with pockets full of supplies, enough water for the day, more than enough food, and I’d told the ranger where I was going. Twenty years of professional disaster planning in my head.

The flash flood chapter is what happened next.

I was alone, the way I prefer to be, and I was wrong about the desert. A man who wrote emergency plans for a living. That’s the chapter. Preparation reduces your exposure. It doesn’t make you exempt, and finding that out in person is a different education from reading it.

What does a major earthquake feel like from inside a house?

It started as a low rumble and a gentle shake, and then it stopped being 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 then got on top of her.

My kitchen table slid six feet as though something had hold of it. My bookshelves rocked back and forth like drunks.

Four thirty-one in the morning, and I’d run the drills. I still did the only thing I did. Got my wife on the floor and put myself on top of her, because nothing in that room gave anybody time to reason anything out. That’s why the man and the window stayed in my head for thirty years. You don’t get to decide in an earthquake. You get to do whatever you already knew, and if the only thing you knew was wrong, that’s what you’ll do.

Can you depend on help arriving after a disaster?

The first chapter asks it. Katrina answers it, and the answer is worse than most people expect.

In August 2005 Katrina reached Category Five over the Gulf, weakened, and came ashore in southeast Louisiana as a Category Three with sustained winds of a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. It killed more than eighteen hundred people. 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 were involved, local, state and federal, and people still spent four days on a roof.

I’m not interested in whether anybody tried. I spent twenty years writing plans for a company that assumed its own head office might be gone by morning, and the thing that separates a plan that works from a plan that reads well is whether anybody tested it under load. Katrina was the test. Every agency involved had a plan. None of them had rehearsed the version where the other agencies were also underwater.

So the question I ask in that chapter is how long it took, and what people did while they waited. I put that chapter first on purpose. Every other chapter assumes an answer to it, and most people have never worked out what theirs is.

What is in Real World Survival?

I wanted the whole plan in one book, and a go bag is a small piece of a plan.

My original book was about building a go bag. I kept that chapter and buried it in the middle on purpose.

A bag is one component of a plan, and most people buy the bag instead of making the plan, because the bag is a thing you can order and a plan is an afternoon of thinking about your own death. The prepper industry knows that perfectly well and sells accordingly.

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 mindset part is the one I’m proudest of. Gear breaks, plans get outrun by events, and what’s left in the first hour is whether you can keep your head long enough to do what you already know.

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?

I wrote it for people who aren’t preppers and have no plans to become preppers.

I subtitled it the complete family survival guide, and I had one reader in mind: 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.

I’m tired of watching decent people get hurt by emergencies they had years to get ready for. You can only prepare while the lights are on and the shops are stocked, that window shuts without telling you, and everybody who ever said they’d get to it was standing in it when they said so.

From the author

Real World Survival
Real World Survival is about preparing without becoming a prepper, and it starts with a Christmas hike in 1986 when nobody knew where we were.

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