What do to if I survive a nuclear blast in my city?
What do to if I survive a nuclear blast in my city?
I recently saw a comment chain about nuclear bombs, and that led me to thinking about this. Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city. I survive relatively fine, but obviously the main part of the city has been destroyed, while major zones extending from the center were also badly damaged. What would be a good response to (a) survive and (b) help out the recovery effort?
Move away from the mushroom cloud. It. Pay attention to the direction of the wind and try to see if the mushroom cloud itself is moving in order to tell what the wind is doing higher up.
You want to avoid being underneath it. That means primarily just moving away from it, adding more distance. But also, keeping in mind the top of that mushroom cloud is itself moving across the sky (being pushed by wind), so if it’s going the same direction as you, switch directions to get out from under it.
The mushroom cloud is full of radioactive material which will come settling out. If the initial blast didn’t kill you, this radiation is the next biggest danger. Just keep moving away, away, away.
Assuming your home isn't on fire. Seal everything, do not go outside! If possible, stay inside for as long as possible. Fill everything with water your bathtub, every cup, bucket, etc. Monitor the radio for emergency broadcasts for what to do next. AM stations are more likely to work. If you have a CB radio handy, (depending on your country) you can talk to authorities on Channel 9.
Great questions, and you need to familiarize yourself with the correct answers. Generally memorize the protocols. I'm going to regurgitate what I have internalized & point you to online resources to educate yourself further.
Preparations made well in advance really give an advantage to survival.
As soon as a nuke is dropped, go the fuck home. Turn on your faucets & fill all sinks & bathtubs, as this may be the last of your easy, clean, potable water you'll get from the grid for who knows how long.
One of the biggest & best things you can do is shelter in place, I think for a week. Radioactive fallout & the heavy alpha particles will be everywhere, and blow everywhere. Cover all windows & doors with Visqueen sheeting & duct tape, control & eliminate the travel of random-ass particulates. After 1 week, the radioactive potency of the dust particles should be reduced by 85-90%. That's huge. So shut your windows & doors, seal everything up, and sit your ass down. It could save your life.
Shelter in place requires food, water, preps. I think it's overkill, but overkill is also kind of what you need/want, 1 gallon of water per person per day. When Russia started getting on their shit, people were buying up iodine tabs. This harmless substance negates the harmful effects of potential radioactive exposure via your food & drink. The trick is you have to take this stuff a set amount of time..before...exposure to radioactive particles. It protects your thyroid gland, IIRC. Have water, have food, maybe have a container or two of those fancy tablets.
Especially in the earlier days, you help others by being able to help yourself. If there are assistance efforts, you can turn them down & the help can go to others in more dire need.
We can, and do, talk about prepping things for years on end. I would recommend you tune in to Canadian Prepper (hey,I watched some of the video after & I didn't do too badly!)
Yes, Canadian Prepper touches on this. In my words: information is good. But the authorities, and other people, may lie or not tell the entire truth. They tell you what they want you to know. Good advice in general.
Kurzgesagt has a video on it.
This brings to mind something David Mitchell said once on Would I Lie To You (British panel show):
In response to Kelvin MacKenzie's claim that the "This Is My" guest had built him a nuclear bunker:
David Mitchell: If there's a nuclear war, I don't want to live. I don't want to come out of a shelter and try to rebuild society. I have no skills. Okay, society is destroyed by a nuclear war, we're basically - we're back to the bronze age...how long is it gonna be before people start pitching panel shows again? It's gonna be at least 2000 years!
Watch it here if you want, it was annoyingly hard to find.
However I don't think David - who is a comedian - is precisely right about how such a war would affect the state of technology. If there are survivors, I don't think we'd really be back to the bronze age. Even if all technology was destroyed (which it wouldn't be), give humans a few decades, we'll have some sort of modern technology back up and running. Maybe not computers, but some certainly some analogue electronics - the knowledge isn't lost. Communications would be one of the first points of focus, so television would follow closely behind.
No time like the present to get involved with something like a Community Emergency Response Team or its local equivalent. FEMA has manuals and other training materials available online which address the matter of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE; sometimes just CBRN or NBC depending on agency or publication date) incidents. Won't make you an expert on yield estimation or fallout mapping but there is information which may be useful for improving individual and community resilience.
Personally, I think the likelihood of getting nuked is low and it's much more likely that a CERT volunteer will be called upon to assist in natural disasters or major accidents to relieve the burden on professional crews. Where I live, teams have been employed to assist in redirecting traffic around areas with downed power lines or, in one case somewhat recently, a significant natural gas leak. Firefighters and other specialists establish a safe perimeter before handing off the site to volunteers so they can respond to other incidents throughout the city while repair crews work down their list of priorities.
Long comment short: building useful skills and relationships before shit meets fan means less scrambling to figure it out on that day and there are real, practical applications for that knowledge beyond LARPing with Jim-Bob's moron militia.
Attention all Fallout gamers!
BackOnMyBS is in trouble and they need your help to survive a nuclear explosion in their city. To do this, they need a Vault and a trusty canteen. To help them, all they need is your credit card number, the three numbers on the back and the expiration month and year. But you gotta be quick so that BackOnMyBS can build a Vault and survive nuclear annihilation!
Make sure my PC is ok and all GOG games downloaded. If needed, transfer the battlestation to a safer or better location, with a generator/solar panels & a decent battery.
Profit.
My life won't change, I just won't go to work.if you're gonna die in nuclear strike, it'll be most likely because a building you're in collapses. unless you're very close to a target that might get a ground burst or small nuke, like airport, large transit node like cargo railroad terminal, high level military command hq or such, you shouldn't worry too hard about radiation either. in any other case, if you're within fatal radiation dose range, then you're also deep within overpressure-that-will-collapse-any-building range and instant-third-degree-burn-and-beyond range. at smaller yields you'll see fireball range greater than fatal radiation range. play around with https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ to get the idea
if you're outside, you'll get thermal burns and might be thrown around but as long as nothing falls on you, and ignoring burns, you should be mostly fine. there won't be utilities, no power, no water, no communications, so you better have some batteries. if you have shelter, then if you have water and food to weather it out, and if you're upwind of groundbursts if any, then you'll probably survive
...long enough to be drafted, because in space of day we went from peace to total war
The first rule is don't become another casualty.
Hunker down for a few days, iirc the most dangerous radiation will decay in the first few days. You don't want the ash on your body. Fill your bathtub/whatever else with water to drink and ration your food.
Become a Brahmin rancher.
My understanding is the thing you most need is community. No one is likely to make it on their own, but if you can band together, your chances increase.
Nuclear? In your city? You're dead in a matter of days... maybe months at best.
If you are exposed to particulate dust or debris, once you are inside an area that is enclosed, be mindful of everywhere you go and everything you touch, and consider them contaminated. The way radioactive contamination like dust particles are removed from people in places like nuclear power plants is with shaving cream. The way shaving cream expands on the skin lifts hair by design, but also lifts particulates so that they may be rinsed off.
The most dangerous radioactive elements have the shortest half lives. The quantity of particles is still important. Like the elephants foot at Chernobyl is still deadly to a human standing in the same room for only a few minutes due to quantity. However, just after a nuclear mass murder event by a subhuman psychopath, staying away from the earliest byproducts of the nuclear reaction is critical. These are extremely harmful even in the fine dust on the outskirts.
Nuclear technology is our most irresponsible atrocity we lack the time perspective to clearly understand. Imagine if the wars of the crusaders 1000 years ago were causing people to die directly as a result of their weapons, not because of geopolitical fallout. Nuclear is an atrocity for any use because of our incompetent governments, but it is a far greater crime on all future generations for thousands of years to come. History will make us the most despised humans in the entire lineage of the species. This is the only legacy any of us will be remembered for.
Thanks for the reminder, I have too look up where my designated bunker is.
Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city.
If it's that close you then essentially you'll need to decide whether to die quick or slow :/
If you're actually planning on surviving you'd need to stay in an underground bunker or something similar for at least 3-5 weeks to be safe enough to travel outside (and we're assuming you have clean sources of food/water, bathroom, etc, during that time). If you make it that far then afterwards you'd likely want to go outside & get as far away from the radiation zone as possible.
Coincidentally the basement of my work building actually has a fallout shelter sign from back in the day so the basement might survive a blast but I don't see how I'd make it 3-5 weeks without being extra prepared for that beforehand.
Probably just get away from the city or away from the radiation, forget about helping recovery effort as initial response. That can happen once your safe.
I live on the coast so I'm stealing a fucking boat. I'll check the pharmacies first, but that's the most likely place that people are going to be killing each other over stuff.
Not to be a clit but it kind of depends where your city is.
Everyone is talking about radiation but IMO having food and water is more important.
In a large city, things would turn to shit within hours. There would be violence.
Honestly, if you don't have a relative on a farm within a days walk, then your best bet is a refugee camp.
If you survive (big if) find Steve Huffman, he thinks he’ll be a good leader in a post apocalyptic earth