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?
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.
You’d think that lesson would still be fresh from the pandemic, when at the very beginning the CDC tried to get the public not to hoard masks so the actual medical professionals could have them, then that got twisted and metastisized into “masks don’t work” and the ant-masker/anti-vaxxer bullshit.
The frustrating thing is that masks don’t protect you particularly well. What they do is protect others from any infection you are carrying. This is why it was more important to provide them to those interacting with infected or vulnerable people. It limited the risk of spreading it further.
Probably a stupid question, but during that week, going outside to fire up my whole house generator would probably be a death sentence. Right? So I should just live without electricity for a week? That reality has me thinking that I need to get one of those generators that turns itself on when power goes out. It would be really convenient during the winter anyways, since we lose power a lot when it snows around here.