If you are a few hundred miles downrange from a major progressive stronghold (which will be most of the target areas), there are a number of expedient shelters to be built. Borrow your neighbor's backhoe, dig a eight foot deep by four foot wide trench. Park your vehicle on top. Place tarps in the doors, trunk, and hood to hold them in place and put sandbags around the ground clearance area on the tarps, except at the end where you will enter and exit. Use those ammo boxes to close that after you enter and fill in with rags. Not ideal but can substantially reduce exposure. Motor home even better, because attenuation is both by mass and geometry. Radiation at the end of a 600 foot tunnel is blocked by collisions with the walls and to a far lesser extent by air mass. There were some storm channel tunnels near our apartment in Irvine that were on my emergency list.
Dig the trench and place house doors on top. Then pile three feet of earth on top. The doors won't collapse. The earth arching takes upper layer load and distributes to the sides of the trench. Tarps and ammo boxes at the entrance.
Trump needs to get Short Fat turned extra crispy before Doomsday. A reader mentioned a book that I have read but whose title escaped me: Cresson Kearney, Nuclear War Survival Skills.
I remember reading about the "car over trench" shelter as a child, and when reflecting upon it later thinking "the authorities just wanted people likely to be in a blast-zone to pre-bury themselves, to save trouble later".
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to do that, and if you have the time, it might be worth trying to dig a trench with a 90° bend, even if it means pushing some earth back into part of the trench that would otherwise continue straight. Radiation is so named because it doesn't turn corners very well (radia = ray)
ReplyDeleteRather than depend on air attenuation at the entrance to a tunnel, if you have 55-gallon drums of water, store those between the entrance and where people will be staying. As long as the barrels are sealed, contaminated dust can't get in, and rays passing through won't make the water radioactive.
You will probably want some sort of filter for the dust that's kicked up. At the very least, surgical masks. A very nice touch would be a HEPA filter, run by your backup generator. At work, I have a handbook which lists a number of improvised filters, and gives a rough estimate of how much dust they will remove. If you're interested, I'll look it up when I get back in Tuesday.
Karl: That would be useful.
ReplyDeleteUnknown: Strictly a fallout shelter. In blast area, little to bury. Too cynical!
Regarding shelters I'm pessimistic about this not being a waste of time in most cases. Over maybe I'm just a full-time pessimist anyways.
ReplyDeleteFor starters the world has changed dramatically since the '50's and 60's. We live in a much more selfish and evil society. You may have to kill a lot of people to survive (unless most of them are killed of by the bomb/sickness/starvation before they are a threat). Even with lots of firepower it is easy to be overtaken by sheer numbers of the mass of crazy and desperate people.
I've heard stories from Korean war vets about how the most of the enemy didn't even have rifles and just had rocks and clubs but even so and with heavy fire power when the bugles blew in the early morning the mass of them was still hard to fight off and they were like a swarm on an anthill. Yes I know the North Koreans can't invade the mainland US--they don't have the ability to get them here. My point is if you are in an urban area with hundreds or even thousands or more desperate people (people in the US when it hits) alive they will stop at nothing to get what you have. Hunger and fear are overwhelming. Hopefully they will be to sick and injured too do that. And in a few days they will die off.
A perfect example is that Twilight Zone episode where the neighbors destroyed the one neighbors shelter trying to get in.
I supposed you better plan on hunkering down with enough supplies if it lasts for months till everyone else is dead or somehow society is able to come back.
Now at least the North Koreans assuming they can deliver anything to the US would likely not get in more than 1 or 2 so it would not be like a war with the USSR where it could be far more vast.
It would likely be a major west coast city that we love (being sarcastic) like San Francisco or LA. So if you are far enough away from those nothing to worry about.
But then could our society survive something like that without going "nuclear" here when the left fall apart?
Maybe that would be a good thing...
Maybe this is the prelude to Armageddon...
The reference I'm thinking of has gone hiding.
ReplyDeleteI'll keep an eye out for it.
Bottom line, though, is that in conditions where you want to avoid inhaling dust, anything you can improvise as a filter is better than nothing. A handkerchief, folded in half or quarters, will remove a substantial fraction of particles, and wet is better than dry.