If a disaster ever damages your home and leaves you without power and pure water, this reference will see you through those dark hours. Absent of "survivalist" extranea, this practical primer describes how to prepare for a disaster in advance, be safe as it happens, and repair anything afterward. It further describes ...+How to store and use all the foods, tools, and other "calamity commodities" you will need when misfortune comes knocking on your door.+How to perform those everyday tasks that keep you alive -cook, wash the dishes, clean your clothes, bathe, go to the bathroom, and keep everything sanitary. +How to fashion all kinds of household items in simple and useful ways.+How to deal with disasters at home or at work, in a public building or while driving, in a plane crash or train wreck, on a sinking ship or in the vicinity of a shooter.+How to defeat disasters without generators, weapons, and wilderness survival skills. When disaster strikes, far more citizens realize the need for teamwork and try to help each other -and would rather be known as Samaritans than Survivalists.This veritable bible of disaster preparedness contains 216 pages of inspiring text and 200 eye-popping pictures that open with a concisely expansive two-page-wide table of contents that leads you straight to what you're looking for, is innovatively formatted with slanted columns of text that ease your reading, is enriched with heavily bulleted to-do lists that quicken your search for information, and closes with an extremely detailed index -all of which can save your life and the lives of your loved ones, your business colleagues, your friends, even strangers whose fate is suddenly woven with yours in any misfortune you may face.You'd think everyone would want these things. But many customers will skip the shopping cart on the right because they have seen so many disasters on TV that they've acquired a panic mentality when they envision these events. "Disasters scare me to death!" they cry. "I don't want to read about them!" But really, learning how to defeat a disaster is as easy as deciding to go out to dinner. Remove the dread that bars your doors of perception, and you will enjoy a banquet of treats that will make the difference between suffering and safety. You will enter a brave new world that will erase your panic, release you from the grip of terror, and remove you from the deadening effects of indifference -and lead you to that switch of initiative that will energize your intelligence, empower your imagination, and arouse your sense of vigilance in ways that will tilt the odds of danger from being forever against you to being always in your favor. Another reason why disasters seem so needlessly frightening is because many victims tend to see them as a whole rather than divide them into much smaller and more manageable problems. A disaster can seem overwhelming when you are confronted with everything at once -but if you break it down to the 50 or 60 little things you need to do and knock them off one at a time, the whole thing can be as easy as eating a lavish dinner one bite at a time. The menu is simple. First you obtain what you need (easy if you have accurate lists which this book provides). Second, you store what you've obtained in a safe place (this usually involves some precautionary architectural design and construction which this book describes in professional detail, especially since it is authored by an architect). Third, you dice the dilemma into tiny parts until each is as easy to do as your normal routines during more tranquil hours (which this book describes in language a ten-year-old can understand). It's like eating: you don't wait until five before six to get your food for dinner; long before this you will have shopped for and stored what you will eat so it will all be there when six o'clock rolls around. In these respects and more, the delight of defeating a disaster awaits you.
About the Author: About the Author Since graduating from the Cornell School of Architecture in 1964, Robert Brown Butler has been involved in every aspect of architectural design and construction for fifty years. From 1967 to 1973 he worked as a carpenter in California and Colorado. Since 1973 he has lived in New York where he has worked somewhat chronologically as a carpenter, contractor, registered architect, and author. In 1981 he wrote his first book, The Ecological House, which describes how to design and build houses that minimize damage to the environment. Between 1984 and 2002 he authored five books on architectural engineering for McGraw-Hill, and in 2012 he wrote Architecture Laid Bare, a book for laymen that describes the latest environmental and technical issues that face American architecture today. Mr. Butler's environmental and engineering expertise as expressed in his previous publications are relevant in the Disaster Handbook, for the central nature of most disasters is that each is a clash between the outer forces of the environment and the inner forces of building engineering. Mr. Butler's seventh book has a website: architecturelaidbare.com, and his typography has a website, bufontforge.com. The present book also has a website, http: //thedisasterhandbook.com.