This series is about getting you through a catastrophe. The first three articles (see “All articles in this series”) were about preparing and responding to the world around you when it’s consumed by calamity. As our world here was. In this article, we deal with how to handle all the information, good and bad, that comes at you while you are trying to respond to a disaster.

I’m known to you at Quality Digest as the director and main hand behind the video content here. As with some Quality Digest employees, my life was altered with shocking speed in November 2018 when the Camp Fire destroyed most of the communities on the Paradise Ridge in Butte County, California.

And like any catastrophe that includes destruction, the deaths of innocents, factors of human folly, and shreds of knowledge bought at too high a price, there are echoes to be found in the U.S. Civil War.

One morning in 1862, two Union soldiers, Sergeant John Bloss and Corporal Barton W. Mitchell, noticed three cigars wrapped with paper. You see, they were resting in a field where a few days earlier Confederate troops had camped. Unwrapping the paper, they found a memo titled “Special Order No. 191, Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia.”

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