Book Review: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Disaster Preparedness

RealisticPreparedness.com Book Review

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Disaster Preparedness

by: Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez

Summary:

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Disaster Preparedness sets out a generic plan for dealing with disasters, based on the concept that all of these events share many of the same basic challenges.

Sources:

The information in this book comes primarily from the author’s background in Disaster Medicine and personal experiences.

Depth:

The first part of the book makes the case for disaster preparedness being a good idea and then goes over the basics of being prepared. The author then spends seven chapters covering floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, blizzards, pandemics and toxic spills. The last section of the text deals with disaster recovery and has some simple checklists for putting together a basic emergency kit and general ideas on what to do before, during and after a disaster. As the title would suggest, most of the information provided is broad in scope and basic in content.

Overall:

The chapter on Pandemics has excellent information on the limits of our medical system when dealing with large scale disasters, such as the outbreak of a new type of flu. The author’s medical background really helps them do a good job explaining the specific concerns related to these events.

  This book makes the case that the reader should create a generic plan that will cover multiple disaster scenarios. But, most of the detailed planning information is limited to creating and using a 72 hour kit.