Have you ever had a disaster at your home, one that could be featured on that HGTV show, “Help, I wrecked my House?” We have a summer home in Southern California. It turns out that while we needed rain to replenish our reservoirs, we certainly didn’t want the incredible downpours that inundated our area, destroyed the roof and ruined our bathroom, among other things.

Besides dealing with rainstorms here, we’ve had to deal with hurricanes at our other home in Florida from time to time. Thinking about hurricanes reminded me of a story involving a gigantic one. It’s the bestselling book, The Perfect Storm, written by Sebastian Junger. That thriller was made into an award-winning film starring George Clooney. Described as “The storm of the century,” it is based on an incredible confluence of events that wreaked havoc in the North Atlantic and took the lives 6 men – a crew that was never found. The author recreates what might have happened to those crewmen and how valiantly they fought to survive. Junger uses time and pacing similar to Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air about a disaster on Mount Everest.

Finally, when I wrote one of my thrillers, Castle Bravo, it was based on the “threat” of a catastrophic event. The Major General in charge of our missile defense systems worldwide told me that what “keeps him up at night” is the possibility of our enemies developing a small nuclear device they could put on a delivery device (one as simple as a Scud Missile) – and their intent is to shoot it off and detonate it 50-100 miles up in the atmosphere over our country. That explosion, called an Electro Magnetic Pulse, wouldn’t kill people on the ground; however, it would “fry” all of our electronics so we would have no computers, communication, transportation, refrigeration, sanitation. As the General put it, “This would set us back to the year 1910 and don’t think our enemies aren’t considering it.” In fact, a few years ago the leader of North Korea was quoted in The Wall Street Journal making just such a threat saying he “could destroy the US electricity grid using an EMP.” I simply had to write a book about it and pray it never turned into an actual disaster!