The author
Alan Redbourn
Three jobs, one subject, and not a qualification between them.
The trade
He went into the RAF at 17 as a mechanic, because the alternative was a town with nothing in it. Ground trades: the unglamorous half of an air force, where the job is that a thing has failed and somebody is waiting on it. Not front line, and he says so before anybody asks.
What it gave him was a habit of mind about failure. Things break at the joints and the seals, at the connections and the handovers. And they give warning first.
The houses
Then about 20 years inspecting insurance claims on domestic property. Floods, fires, escapes of water, storm damage. Thousands of British homes, entered on the worst day those households had ever had.
That is where the books come from. Not one dramatic event, but the same handful of failures repeating in different postcodes until the pattern was more obvious than any individual case.
The plans
Finally, local authority emergency planning. Writing the documents that say what a council does when a large number of people lose water, or power, or their homes, and reading the national risk assessments as source material rather than as news.
That is where the differences between the four nations stopped being trivia and became the thing he checks first.
What he is not
He holds no qualification of any kind, and the books never suggest otherwise. He is not a clinician, a lawyer, a gas engineer, an electrician or a surveyor. He looked at damage, and somebody qualified decided what it meant.
He has never been the person who signs it off.
Why the books are the way they are
Every claim of fact carries the name of whoever published it and the day it was checked, and there is a register at the back of each book so you can check it rather than trust it. That is not scholarship. In claims work, an observation with no date on it is worth nothing in a file, and in planning, a document quoting a superseded rule gets somebody hurt.
The prose is flat on purpose. In a report, a reach for a dramatic word is a reach for something the evidence will not carry.