rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">If You Must Go
Joseph Pred
Founder, Mutual Aid Risk & Safety
stay safe & healthy
As an Emergency and Risk Manager with over twenty years experience, you could say I’m a disaster geek. That’s because for me each phase of the disaster planning cycle is very important, be it preparing, mitigating, responding, or recovery. While everyone can connect with the exciting aspects of responding to an emergency of the sirens blaring, running bravely into the danger zone variety, few realize that what makes such heroics possible starts with the parts that might actually seem as quite boring. Planning, checklists, training and logistics are all invisible when large incidents happen and you see people coming to the rescue, but that’s honestly what gets you to the finish line. Without this essential planning, your chances of making it even past the starting line are slim. While nothing can truly stop the devastation of a pandemic, what you do in advance can make the inevitable recovery period much easier for you and your family. After all, this is going to be stressful enough as it is without also having to buy supplies, figure out
all the details, and learn how to keep yourself safe in the middle of a pandemic.
When first presented with the idea of collaborating with Tim I didn’t hesitate and instantly said I was on board with co-authoring this book with him. From my Emergency and Risk Management experience you might wonder how an expert in primitive technology and outdoorsurvival swould mesh with my first responder perspective. But actually, Tim’s knowledge and experience is the perfect counterbalance. While I’ve seen plenty of emergency preparedness books written either by a survival pro or an emergency responder, each has their own unique angle on how to survive disasters, and never had I seen one that combined both perspectives into one volume. Based on Tim’s previous writing I knew we would bring a point of view to this
book that would complement each other’s strengths.
It wasn’t until the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic that I realizedthe lack of disaster preparedness books specifically focused on infectious disease. While most disasters are regional in scale, pandemics are global and include an avalanche of information
from the media and the internet. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.
Reading this handbook will give you the skills to plan and the
confidence to be resilient enough to survive future pandemics.
I’ve been a survival instructor for more than two decades, and I can tell you from experience thatthere’s nothing easy about survival in any type of emergency scenario. But if we look at history, survival was our day job as early humans. In ancient times, we scrambled to protect ourselves from threats and we struggled to acquire the supplies to help us last one more day. In a modern crisis, it can feel like we have returned to that stressful hand-to-mouth way of life. Our shelters, garb, and technology are different, but our needs and vulnerabilities haven’t changed in tens of thousands of years. We need the same things we have always needed, and we can be harmed in the same ways we’ve faced forever. Our “caves” may be air-conditioned now, but we still hide in them to protect ourselves from the threats of the day (like viruses and desperate people). As we make “supply runs” to the store in the midst of disease, these hunting and gathering trips can feel like an expedition to some hostile landscape. While this all sounds rough, there is a bright side: We can find comfort in continuity. Our ancestors made it through plague after plague, for thousands of years and they did it with fewer resources and less knowledge than we
possess today. If they endured, we can too. It’s just going to take some hard work.
Getting sick and fighting over the last roll of toilet paper aren’t the only hardships we face in a pandemic. We may lose our jobs due to the injured economy or lose a relationship due to the stress and strain of the situation. Pandemics are like a sucker punch, coming out of nowhere and striking us by surprise. That’s bad enough, but then the crisis keeps tossing surprises at us. In times like these,
