LMI Newsletter Page 33

by Corcceigh Green

Even if you are living in a safe area or have located

your retreat in a safe area outside of blast and fire

zones, you must still protect yourself from fallout.

Fallout can be carried for hundreds of miles down

wind where it literally falls out of the air and onto

your property.

Fallout emits gamma radiation in lethal doses. Gamma rays are high energy photons that are very penetrating. They can pass into and/or through objects like the walls of your house or you, yourself. As a gamma ray passes through living tissue it interacts with it's molecular structure by bumping into atoms imparting some of the gamma ray's energy into the atom's electrons causing the electrons to jump out of their atom's orbit, ionizing the atom. This has a devastating effect on living tissue, especially protein, (the stuff your muscles and heart are made of). The effect is so devastating that 50% of adult humans in their prime absorbing four hundred RADs of gamma radiation in a thirty day period will die from the exposure.

Fortunately, gamma radiation can be shielded against. Shielding material is all around us and can be as cheap as dirt. Shielding material must be dense and posses an atomic structure utilizing a profuse amount of electrons in their orbits. The easiest and most abundant shielding material to work with is dirt. The halving thickness for packed dirt, (halving thickness is the amount of a certain material necessary to drop the amount of radiation entering a shelter in half), is 3.6 inches. It is generally agreed that to maintain an excellent level of protection for your shelter, a layer of 3 feet of packed dirt is necessary. That's ten halving thicknesses, or radiation will decrease by one half of it's dose ten times before it reaches the inside of your shelter. In other words, if the dose rate outside is 300 roentgens per hour, it will be reduced to .29146875 roentgens per hour in your shelter.

Situating a shelter below ground puts an entire planet between your floor and walls and you. An underground shelter will not be penetrated by gamma radiation from below or through the walls. The weakness of this shelter is in it’s entrance and roof. Fallout will be deposited on your shelter’s roof and on it’s entry way. Your shelter’s roof should be covered with packed earth. Three feet of packed earth for ten halving thicknesses is minimum. Cresson Kearney recommends five feet of packed earth for a blast shelter. With this amount, why not go for six feet of packed earth and provide for twenty halving thickenesses? Your roof could receive a deposit of fallout radiating the area with 1,000 roentgens per hour and only allow one ten thousandth of a roentgen into the shelter! You would be very well protected indeed.

The other weak point is your entry way. You have to enter and exit your shelter and you can’t cover that point with packed earth. The door will keep fallout from entering, but gamma radiation will penetrate that point easily. There are two methods for hardening this point. You should employ both methods to increase protection. The first is to incorporate right angle bends in the entry way. This will lessen the amount of gamma radiation that reaches you. Gamma rays do not actually travel like rays. They propagate like all electromagnetic light, in waves, as though the

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ripples in a pond. This means that gamma radiation will not just travel down your entry way in a straight line and end it’s journey at the right angle bend. The wave form will round the bend to find your shelter, but will loose some energy. Making your entry way a tunnel will place greater distance between you and the gamma source, which will also cause the gamma radiation to loose more potency. You may also place another right angle bend in the tunnel, reducing the amount of radiation reaching you again.

The other method for hardening this weak point is to add shielding. As mentioned, you cannot block the door to your entry way, but you can store shielding material like bricks inside your shelter. Once you have everyone in your shelter who is supposed to be there, you may bring the bricks or other materiel out of it’s storage space and stack them in one of the bends in your entry way. This will provide just over a halving thickness for every wall of brick that you can stack. Do not permanently mortar the bricks into place! You must be able to exit your shelter when it is safe to do so. This means you must stack the bricks with care so that they do not collapse. A double wall will be more stable and provide twice the protection. Leave a space in the wall to run an air intake pipe through to provide fresh air for the occupants. Also, if you have more than one bend in your entry tunnel, stacking a brick wall in each bend will greatly improve protection.

You must provide fresh air for the occupants of your shelter. Sealing off the outside air from your shelter will keep out fallout, but the occupants could die of suffocation just as well as radiation. In order to provide fresh air and keep out fallout, you will have to build an air filter and air pump. When considering an air pump, you must weigh the advantages of an electrical powered blower unit against the dependability of a hand operated piston unit.

An electrical powered blower may be battery operated with a DC unit or with battery and

inverter with an AC unit. The advantages are that these units will move a large amount of air, can be expediently manufactured and human labor is not necessary other than metering the amount of air moved into the shelter, metering radiation levels that may find it’s way through filters and turning the blower on and off. The disadvantages are that these units require charged batteries and/or working inverters which can be damaged by EMP. Deep cycle marine batteries work best as they are slower to discharge than car batteries and may be drawn down and recharged numerous times without damaging. Inverters should be stored in EMP resistant containers. More on that later. Also have spare inverters stored in EMP resistant containers in case you are operating your air blower when a nuke is popped close enough to you that EMP damages your operating inverter.

To make an electrical air blower you’ll need one medium sized box fan, sheet metal screws, 20 gauge sheet metal, J.B. Weld and silicone caulking. We’ll consider the end of the fan which moves air away from it as the front. Simply cut a square of sheet metal in the dimension of the fan. In the center of the sheet metal square, cut a circle in the diameter of your air intake pipe. Force a section of pipe through this circle and use J.B Weld to affix it into place. Use silicone caulking to be sure there are no air leaks in this fit. The section of pipe should be short and will be fitted to the air intake pipe with a coupler.

Now fix the section of sheet metal with the section of pipe affixed to the rear of the fan with sheet metal screws. Make sure that the air pipe does not interfere with the fan’s blade. Trim the pipe with a cut off tool or tin snips if necessary. The portion of the pipe that protrudes from the sheet metal square should be positioned so that it protrudes from the rear of the box fan. You can J.B. Weld the sheet metal square to the box fan too, but always be sure to caulk the seams anyway.

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The above is the heart of your electrical air supply for your shelter. Attach the air intake pipe to the blower you’ve just made with a coupler and caulk or vinyl tape the coupler to the pipe protruding from the blower. As long as you have power, you’ll have air.

A hand operated piston air pump has one very big advantage. If EMP takes out your last inverter you will still have air. The air piston pump requires only one power source. It’s called muscle. This unit moves a sufficient amount of air and is reliable under the worst of conditions. The disadvantage is that due to the exercise the unit will provide the operator(s), it will cause the humidity level of the shelter to rise, will create an area of disturbance within the shelter, creating less livable space. Air quality must be monitored constantly and the air pump will need constant attention in order to move air into the shelter. The utter reliability of these units when civilization has been blasted apart makes them worth the effort to build and operate. When powered units fail due to lack of electricity, these simple mechanisms will continue to provide air.

You will need to move twelve cubic feet of filtered air per minute per person into your shelter. Your blower/fan should state how much air it moves printed somewhere on it or on the box it came in. Your air pump will have a chamber where air is forced out of the pump and into the room. The volume of this chamber will equal the volume of air moved per pump. X number of occupants in your shelter will need 12 cubic feet of air per minute. This is X x 12. Your air pump forces Y amount of filtered air into your shelter with each pump. To find how many times you should pump your air pump per minute divide X x 12 by Y (X x 12/Y=amount of pumps per minute). Triple this amount if you are using candles or oil lamps for light. If you have ten people in your shelter and the volume of air your pump forces into your shelter is 25 cubic feet (for a chamber measuring 12 inches long, 5 inches wide and 5 inches high) your math will work out as follows: 10 x 12=120, 120/25=4.8. This formula works out that you will need to pump your air pump 5 times per minute to replenish your air. If you are using candles or oil lamps figure at least 15 pumps per minute. Occupants can work in shifts to keep the pump operating around the clock.

As fallout arrives, you can only close off your shelter for a brief time. After fallout has been deposited and even while fallout is still being deposited you will need to bring in air and that air must be filtered. Filtering fallout is a relatively simple procedure. Fallout is basically particulates and ash. A filter can be made from plywood, two by fours, nails, porous foam rubber and

activated or regular charcoal. The dimensions of your filter box will depend greatly upon the dimensions of your air intake pipe. Many people will have the option to use different materials for this. The easiest material to work with for your air intake pipe is the plastic plumbing pipes that you can buy at hardware stores. They are tough and resilient and angles can be made merely by using angles couplers in the pipe for bends. They are not of particularly large diameter, but two, two inch pipes can be laid side by side and double pipe intakes can be fixed to the blower or pump and double outflows fixed to the filter. This will allow enough air flow into the shelter. In absence of such plastic pipes you may utilize black stove pipes. Be absolutely sure to caulk all of

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the seams. Four inch round stove pipe is probably the easiest stove pipe to work with. Use elbow joints for angling around bends.

The filter is a box made from the two by fours and plywood. This is not a fancy undertaking. You make a cube frame with the two by fours and nail the plywood over this. Leave one side open and caulk the seams. The open end goes up. Make a hole in the side of the filter box that will face your shelter. The hole should be the same diameter as your air pipe(s). The hole must be near the bottom of the filter box, but you should not drill through the two by fours. The pipe(s) may be snuggly forced through the hole(s) and caulked. Duct tape cheese cloth over the open end of the pipe that fits through the filter box.

The filter element is also very simple. Lay down a two or three inch thick layer of charcoal or activated charcoal in the filter box and place a square of porous foam rubber on top. Press down gently onto the charcoal layer, but not too firmly. Repeat this until the filter box is full. The top opening of the filter box must be covered with a layer of porous foam rubber.

This filter will remove fallout particles and radioactive iodine from the air you bring into your shelter to breath. You may notice that this filter will clog rapidly as fallout is being deposited on it’s open top. This design is so simple that you should be able to construct more than one for replacements, but it is also prudent to further protect this unit by placing it under a covering. This covering could be as simple as a larger box that fits over the filter box and is propped off of the air pipe with rocks, bricks or cinder blocks. This will also protect the filter’s charcoal and foam rubber element from rainout, snow and other atmospheric conditions. It will keep fallout from being directly deposited on the filter element and more fallout will be kept from the filter as the air must be sucked into the element from a narrow airway between the filter box and the covering box. This will cause an eddy in the air current forcing heavier fallout particles to drift back onto the ground.

If you are close to a high risk area and rely on a blast shelter, you will not be able to deploy your filter until after blast and fire conditions have subsided to a safe level. If your filter and air system is deployed before the blast, it will be destroyed and the blast wave may travel through it and through your open blast doors to damage the interior of your shelter and possibly kill or injure the occupants. Your air system must be pre-fabricated and stored in your shelter before you need it. After evacuating to your shelter, close the blast doors and wait for conditions to subside. Keep in mind there may be multiple strikes on targets in your area. Work to put together your air system inside the shelter first. Check for fires before unsealing your shelter. If conditions are safe, open your blast doors and place your filter system outside close to your blast doors. Couple and caulk the pipe(s) to your filter and connect everything. Either make a notch in your entryway to allow the pipe through and the blast doors to re-seal or prop the blast doors open with sand bags, sealing any openings and forming the bags around the air intake pipe. It is preferable to re-seal your blast doors.

A shelter or retreat situated outside of dangerous blast areas are easier to defend. Bear in mind, however, that nuclear war is as dynamic and fluid as any type of warfare. Targets change and move position. Because your area is safe, it will attract militaries to establish operations there, which will then become targets. Always leave yourself the option to retreat or harden your shelter further.

For those that are outside of high risk areas and do not have the option to build a blast shelter, a very well protected shelter can be built in one’s home. It will not protect well against blast, but

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can be hardened against fallout extremely well. There are several things one can do to make this shelter much more protective before the arrival of fallout. Outside of high risk blast and fire zones, fallout could take hours before drifting out of the atmosphere and onto your property. This gives you the opportunity to make further repairs or preparations to your shelter.

First, seal off all of your windows and all but one entry/exit to your house with 6 mil or better plastic and weather stripping. Duct tape around the weather stripping for extra protections. Cap off all of your house’s vents on the roof to prevent fallout from entering them. If you have a fireplace or wood stove cap off and seal the chimney as well. Seal off the vents under your eaves with 6 mil plastic and weather stripping also.

Second, board up all of your windows with plywood. This won’t stop any close by blast effects, but it will shield windows from being broken by longer range blast effects. This will also protect basement and/or lower floor windows as you push dirt against the outer walls of your home.

Third, Shovel or push dirt against the outer walls of your home. If you have or are friends with someone who has a diesel cat, get it running and scrape dirt from anywhere and get it against your home. We’ve already mentioned the value of dirt as a shielding material. Pile the dirt at least three feet thick from the outer wall. This is ten halving thicknesses and will reduce the amount of radiation penetrating through the lower portion of your outer walls.

If you have a basement or sunken first floor and have packed dirt against the outer walls to the height of the first floor ceiling you have an excellent start at hardening your home into a shelter. Your next step is preventing radiation from penetrating through the ceiling.

Fourth, Pack sand bags with clay soil, not sand, and I mean pack them well. Nail plywood sheets overhead onto the beams, one sheet at a time and pack the sand bags between the plywood sheets and the upper story floor. Wedge wood posts between the floor and each corner of each plywood sheet. This may make it harder to move around inside your shelter, but will harden your shelter against penetration of radiation from above. Bricks may be substituted for the sand bags of packed soil. If you have only limited plywood or other materials, harden one room in the manner above. Because radiation can more easily penetrate the ceiling beyond your hardened room, you will receive a greater radiation dose unless you also harden the walls of your hardened room.

Fifth, harden the walls of your hardened room. In rooms adjacent to your hardened room stack bricks or cinder blocks filled with packed soil against the walls adjacent to your hardened room. This will provide protection against exposed walls while the bricks or cinder blocks will not take up space within your hardened room. This will make your shelter more comfortable while

maintaining protection.

Sixth, Set up your air system in the manner described in the preceding paragraphs. If you are running the air intake pipe outside through a door or window, use the upper story openings as your lower story doors and windows must be blocked. If you have no upper story, patch the pipe into a roof vent with a coupler and patch the filter box into the roof vent. A chimney can also be used as an air intake pipe. Merely seal off your chimney from your stove pipe’s inlet and insert the air pipe from the air blower or pump and caulk the seam. On the roof, cap off the chimney with a filter box and caulk the seam. Do not forget to protect the filter box’s open end. The chimney will become the air pipe and the filter will keep fallout from the chimney.

The problem with keeping air filters on your roof is that you’ll have to climb onto your roof to replace dirty filters with clean ones. This means extra exposure time to radiation. One of the

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things you can do to cut down on radiation exposure is to cover the dirt you have packed against your house with tarps and provide your house with a metal roof. If you are dependent upon a well for water, power your well pump with a generator and spray off your roof with a garden hose, then the tarps covering your packed dirt around your house. If you are hooked to municipal water, you may have a problem. Municipal water lines could be broken and pumping stations destroyed during an attack. Keep a cistern for this eventuality and a water pump. This will take a lot of water, so forget spraying down the tarps and focus on the side of the roof you need access to. If you have enough water, spraying down your roof and tarp covering your shielding material will remove fallout from those areas. This means no radiation source will be present there and radiation will not be penetrating this area of your shelter.

Before evacuating your shelter to do this, you must have outer clothing that will protect your regular clothing and skin and hair from coming into contact with fallout. A plastic or vinyl rain suit utilizing a jacket and pants will work well. You’ll also need a respirator or NBC rated mask with filter to keep from breathing in contaminated particles. Also keep several pairs of plastic over-boot coverings. Rubber gloves are also necessary. Vinyl or even regular duct tape must be kept to seal the seams between the articles of clothing. Before re-entering your shelter, spray the suit down and wash it in detergent if possible. Do this while standing in a 55 gallon drum and mark the water as contaminated afterward. Strip off the suit after decontaminating, then re-enter your shelter.

Seventh, After you have sealed off all of your doors and windows, boarded the lower story doors and windows, Packed dirt against your shelter, hardened your ceiling against radiation, hardened your walls against radiation, and installed your air filtration and intake system, you may seal your family into your hardened room or shelter.

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