Twenty-five years of Disaster Recovery

When disaster strikes, the headlines capture the destruction. This book begins with the aftermath, when the news cameras have gone and the difficult work of recovering what remains must begin.For twenty-five years, Bob Oliver responded to floods, fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and industrial catastrophes across fifteen countries and every continent except Antarctica. His work took him into damaged hospitals, flooded buildings, collapsed warehouses, remote mines, and communities confronting losses they could never have anticipated.He stood on a sandbag dike in Winnipeg and watched six hours of backbreaking work disappear beneath the Red River in minutes. In India, he helped direct an international effort to recover 100,000 irreplaceable books and manuscripts submerged in contaminated floodwater. Elsewhere, he worked to preserve confidential records, historic archives, electronics, industrial equipment, and personal possessions that carried value far beyond their physical form.These experiences taught him that nature does not negotiate. They also revealed what people are capable of when buildings fail, history is threatened, and the familiar world is suddenly turned upside down.Part professional memoir, part international travelogue, Twenty-Five Years of Disaster Recovery takes readers behind the scenes of a little-known industry where every assignment presents a different challenge and where ingenuity, judgment, and human cooperation can determine what is lost and what survives.These 25 true stories are sometimes tense, sometimes heartbreaking, frequently unexpected, and often illuminated by the humor that helped people keep moving through extraordinary circumstances.