Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
they could have avoided the vast majority of hundreds of thousands of cases of deaths, massive
birth defects, and chronic health problems attributed to ingesting radioactive materials from the
Chernobyl fallout.
In the case of a terrorist's “dirty bomb,” the primary danger is from ingesting radioactive
contamination that could make you sick in the short term and cause cancer in the long run.
There will be only small amounts of the highly radioactive gamma-type of radiation, which is a
huge initial concern after a nuclear bomb detonation, but not in a “dirty bomb” detonation, so
once the local winds have had a chance to clear out the radioactive smoke and dust particles
from the detonation, your best bet is to get out of the downwind contaminated area as soon as
possible. Filtering the air you breathe and the water you drink will improve your chances of
avoiding ingestion of radioactive particles.
Building a Makeshift Short-Term Radiation Shelter
The easiest and most expedient makeshift fallout shelter is an improved basement-type shelter,
where an earth-covered exterior basement corner wall forms the two main walls that are the
starting point for your shelter. Using sturdy furniture, or quickly scavenged items like doors
taken off their hinges and removed from upper household stories, the object is to build a small
room-within-a-room, where you stack sand bags, books, wood, etc.—whatever dense materials
you can find, on top of the roof and next to the two temporary side walls to improve their
gamma-ray-shielding properties.
In his classic topic,
Nuclear War Survival Skills
, Cresson Kearny suggests building a make-
shift shelter by digging a 3-foot-wide by 4-foot-deep (1 m × 1.25 m) trench, covering it with
7-foot-long (2m) logs and heaping earth on top of these logs. A backyard ditch shelter can be
built in a few hours by two people with picks and shovels, provided the ground is not frozen,
too wet, or too rocky. The object is to try to provide at least 4½ feet (1.4 meters) of head height
in the ditch, covered by at least 30 inches (.75 meters) of packed dirt covering. If the dirt cover-
ing is arched (see
fig. 17-5
), then the arch will take a lot of the load of the cross members hold-
ing up the roof of the shelter, and also provide better blast resistance. The shelter roof should be
supported by 7-foot-long (2 m) wooden poles laid crosswise, or alternatively by doors scav-
enged from the home. If the trench is lined with plastic sheeting, it will be much less damp and
much more comfortable inside the shelter. If available, plastic sheeting should be buried within
the roof during construction to waterproof that too. Such a shelter would provide a protection
