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First 90 Minutes

An Apartment-Dweller's Hurricane Survival Guide

The first 90 minutes after a hurricane warning decide eighty percent of how the next week goes. Most apartment dwellers spend that hour watching the news. This book is the alternative.

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Diagrammatic cover for First 90 Minutes — a clock face on storm-slate background with the title set in geometric sans-serif
90 minutes
the warning window that decides 80% of how the next week goes (Chapter 2)
3 weeks
the longest NYCHA blackout after Hurricane Sandy — 400 buildings, 60,000 residents (Chapter 3)
23 deaths
on Staten Island during Sandy — most in ground-floor units in the surge zone (Chapter 5)

Most hurricane guidance was written for someone else

The standard hurricane guide assumes a car in a driveway, a tank of petrol, and a relative two hundred miles inland with a spare bedroom. If you live in a flat above the second floor in a coastal city, you have none of those three. The guide doesn't apply, and you either ignore it or feel vaguely guilty about ignoring it. Neither response is useful.

Apartment dwellers face different operational realities. Vertical buildings. Shared infrastructure. Lifts that fail when the basement floods. Water pressure that dies when the power dies. Toilets that stop flushing when the pumps stop pumping. None of this is panic. All of it is operational. This is the book for that life.

Inside the book

  1. 1. You Will Not Evacuate — Statistically, operationally, honestly — you will not. Sheltering in place is the realistic option, not the ideal one.
  2. 2. The 90-Minute Rule for High-Rise Households — What you do in the first hour and a half after a warning matters more than every preparation choice you made in the previous five years.
  3. 3. Your Building Is Not Independent — Whether your 20th-floor flat is habitable next Tuesday depends almost entirely on a room you have probably never seen.
  4. 4. Water Up High — Water pressure in tall buildings is a function of electricity. Most people living above the sixth floor have never thought about it.
  5. 5. Don't Ground Floor It — Ground-floor flats in coastal cities are some of the most dangerous urban housing in a hurricane. The rent is cheaper for a reason.
  6. 6. Power Without Killing Yourself — Don't own a petrol generator. Not on the balcony. Not in the stairwell. Here's the category of kit that quietly solved the problem.
  7. 7. Comms When Networks Jam — The cell network didn't fail because the storm broke it. It failed because every one of your neighbours picked up the phone at once.
  8. 8. Sanitation in a Concrete Box — The toilet stops working before most people realise the toilet has stopped working. The Twin Bucket method holds the line.
  9. 9. The Storm Arwen Lessons — The wind came from the wrong direction. Infrastructure is only resilient to what it expects — and the climate is editing the past.
  10. 10. The Week After — The storm passes in a day. The consequences run for a month. Routine beats kit, every time.

Read Chapter 2 for free

Chapter 2 is the spine of the book — the 90-minute rule, stated plainly, with the five moves apartment dwellers should make in the warning window. None of them costs more than £20. Most cost nothing. Drop your email and we'll send the chapter as a PDF.

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AI-generated portrait of Tom Hartwell (see manifesto)

About Tom Hartwell

Tom Hartwell has spent over a decade studying urban survival, disaster preparedness, and the practical operational side of getting through bad situations. He writes from a 40-foot static caravan on a small site cut out of a Welsh valley, anchored to its concrete pad with chains run to seven points, powered by the solar panels on the roof — the kind of slightly-prepared life he advocates for in his books.

All books by Tom Hartwell

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How this book was made

This book was made by one person at a solar-powered static caravan in North Wales. The rig runs only when the sun is up — about six hours a day in summer, three in winter. Most of the chapter drafts were written on local AI hardware: a 24GB GPU running open-source models, powered by the panels on the caravan roof. Editorial work, voice consistency, and quality assurance were done through Anthropic's Claude. The research, structure, opinions, and voice are human.

We work this way because it lets one person make books that actually help, at a price that doesn't sting, with a footprint we can live with. AI here is a tool that supports a human doing meaningful work — not a replacement for it. We'd rather run on sunshine than on a data centre, and we'd rather tell you exactly how the book was made than pretend the toolchain doesn't exist.

Read the full manifesto →

Sources

  1. High-Rise Urban Hurricane Resilience and Vertical Survival Protocols — Research compilation on apartment-dweller emergency protocols, 2024
  2. Flood Resilience at NYCHA: Memorializing Lessons Learned Through the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Recovery Program — New York City Housing Authority, 2021
  3. Lessons Learned from Hurricane Sandy and Recommendations for Improved Healthcare and Public Health Response and Recovery for Future Catastrophic Events — American College of Emergency Physicians, 2015
  4. Storm Arwen Review: Final Report — UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, 2022
  5. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning After a Disaster — MMWR reports following Hurricanes Sandy, Laura, and Ian — U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012–2022