Hello, neighbor! I am rural in your general part of the world, and disaster preparedness has been among my hobbies for most of my life, so I have a few comments!
I notice that you seem to treat personal risks from WWIII as an isolated event, whereas I see it as more of a continuum. It’s like talking about the risks from covid only if one personally contracts the virus, versus considering the bigger picture of risks where the virus itself is one factor but other factors include supply chain interruptions from a combination of worker sickness and policy responses, interruptions of access to medical care even if the medical problem is unrelated to the virus, and so forth. One example of such an effect that I’d expect if the US was participating in a hypothetical WWIII is that the resources we typically use for wildland firefighting would be busy, so wildfires (started by lightning, to say nothing of those which might be intentionally set) could be expected to threaten more property (especially rural and suburban) and run uncontained for longer, generating a lot more smoke which people in cities would have to try not to breathe due to its health risks, and we’ve known for a very long time that masks keep particulates out of the lungs so you’ll still want n95s. Semi-unrelatedly, if that earthquake we’re overdue for manages to wreck the west coast, Bend will be the nearest airport so if you’re living there it’d be prudent to consider the nonzero possibility of a flood of refugees coming through at some point.
How much do you value life?
Covid has highlighted to me that the value of life in various possible futures may differ. One can, without inconsistency, place a high value on life in a world like we knew in 2019, a slightly lower value on life that is spent entirely like we spent 2020, and a lower still value of being the only survivor in a radioactive wasteland.
One thing that comes up late in discussions of preparedness and makes many people quite uncomfortable at first is fully grasping the idea that nobody can survive everything. No matter how prepared you get, there will be some disasters that you simply cannot prepare for. You just get unlucky and bam, you’re dead. I cannot reasonably prevent a meteorite from crashing through my ceiling and smashing my skull open. I cannot reasonably prevent a hidden congenital vascular defect in my heart or brain from deciding that today is the day it stops keeping my blood in the proper tubing. I cannot reasonably prevent some driver from losing control of their vehicle and running me over while I’m walking down the sidewalk. There is always a “welp, guess I’ll die” condition to any preparedness plan, so figuring out where yours is can help dispel the illusion of obligation to prep for certain particularly extreme eventualities.
Buy useful items
Hazmat suits probably won’t help too much, unless you’re doing highly specialized tasks and have the training to use them. Masks probably will help, because lungs are for air and explosions kick up a lot of dust and other crud you don’t want to breathe. Also, there will probably be more fire around (especially in the summer, around here) and breathing smoke is really bad for you.
IMO, there’s a surprising overlap between items that’d be genuinely useful in a disaster and items that are already useful in providing aid to the homeless. I think that useful items are the things that people can’t make themselves, and which reduce the incidence and transmission of sickness. Even if your area isn’t directly affected, it’ll probably be second-order affected by an influx of refugees, hopefully on their way to ports and airports to relocate to less-affected parts of the world. Simple stuff that people no longer make for themselves and yet need to avoid disease include soap, toothbrushes, and clean socks. Hats and blankets, too, in the winter. Water bottles, toilet paper. Perhaps camping style water filters—the Sawyer Mini works fine and can be had for pretty cheap. These things keep basically forever, can be usefully donated if you decide you don’t want to be prepared with them after all, and could be massively useful to make things suck less if society falls apart for a bit.
Also, pick up a copy of the book Where There Is No Doctor (published by Hesperian). It reads a bit like simple english wikipedia, but it’s a great resource for deciding what to treat at home versus what it’s worth making a risky trip to medical aid for if you don’t have the kind of urgent care access available that we’ve gotten used to.
Building a bomb shelter
Whatever you do, don’t bury a shipping container. They’re only meant to withstand forces downward on the corners, and can collapse with you in them if you pile soil on the sides and roof and then the soil multiplies in weight as it gets wet. Getting the airflow right in any DIY’d shelter is pretty challenging, although there are some companies which sell actual engineered shelters if you’re willing to pay the premium to get it from specialists.
How much do you value not having to move to X (or take whatever other action)?
This intersects with risk assessment for other possible disasters. For instance, moving to Bend makes you a lot safer from that big earthquake, yet puts you at greater risk of impact from gas price fluctuations (since so much stuff is trucked there).
Thinking about places that an enemy might want to destroy, it’s also not that hard to imagine a future in which datacenters are appealing targets. Facebook has a DC in Prineville right next to Bend, and I think Google has stuff in the Dalles. Folks are quiet about it, but DCs seem to pop up wherever there’s good hydroelectric power, probably for the combination of cheap electricity, cheap land, and easy access to cold water for thermal management.
Hello, neighbor! I am rural in your general part of the world, and disaster preparedness has been among my hobbies for most of my life, so I have a few comments!
Hi! How cool!
I notice that you seem to treat personal risks from WWIII as an isolated event, whereas I see it as more of a continuum.
I have mixed feelings about this. I definitely agree with the continuum idea. There’s an A% chance that life is X% as valuable as it was. B% chance that it is Y% as valuable. C% chance that it is Z% as valuable. Etc. However, thinking about it that way is difficult. It is easier to just think about it as if there is an A% chance of this single bad thing happening. And making things easier to think about is very useful. When things are difficult to think about, it is tempting to just throw your hands in the air and call it quits.
I think that it makes sense to use some sort of multiplier. Look at those values for X, Y, Z, etc, and try to estimate what the average is. For example, maybe on average life is 10% as good as it used to be post nuclear attack. So instead of using, say, $10M as your value for life, you’d use $1M. Eg. that $1M figure acts as some sort of summary of the continuum you describe. Same with looking at the probabilities.
There is always a “welp, guess I’ll die” condition to any preparedness plan, so figuring out where yours is can help dispel the illusion of obligation to prep for certain particularly extreme eventualities.
Great point. I agree. We should accept defeat in certain scenarios and seek out a good “bang for our buck”.
Hazmat suits probably won’t help too much, unless you’re doing highly specialized tasks and have the training to use them.
Good know know, thanks.
Masks probably will help
Yeah. This is seeming like one of the things worth doing. Although I personally am already stocked up on N95s and also have a P100.
Whatever you do, don’t bury a shipping container. They’re only meant to withstand forces downward on the corners, and can collapse with you in them if you pile soil on the sides and roof and then the soil multiplies in weight as it gets wet. Getting the airflow right in any DIY’d shelter is pretty challenging, although there are some companies which sell actual engineered shelters if you’re willing to pay the premium to get it from specialists.
Wow, good to know! This helped me update some incorrect beliefs. I had previously been thinking that DIY shelter might be worth exploring, because it’s pretty simple, just a matter of how much mass there is between you and the radiation, and what that mass is made of. So just getting hunks of wood or metal should do the trick. I guess not though. I shouldn’t be surprised, this stuff is never as easy as it seems.
I definitely agree with the continuum idea. There’s an A% chance that life is X% as valuable as it was. B% chance that it is Y% as valuable. C% chance that it is Z% as valuable. Etc. However, thinking about it that way is difficult. It is easier to just think about it as if there is an A% chance of this single bad thing happening.
Just a thought on this portion of the exploration. It’s definitely easier to think about the simplified world, but that simplification will impact your option-set as well, and you’ll miss out on value in a whole lot of the actual probability space, because you collapsed it into a different scenario.
You can’t avoid it completely—there are simply too many possibilities and actions to consider in a human brain in a reasonable amount of time. But quantizing to 3-5 scenarios can be a lot more useful than just 2, and will help counteract some of the human biases that crop up if you’re thinking in binary terms.
Very good point, thanks for making it. I think I probably simplify too much. I like the advice to quantize to 3-5 scenarios. I think it’ll help prompt me to get a better feel for my actual option-set, like you said. Making a mental note to do this more in general moving forward.
I had previously been thinking that DIY shelter might be worth exploring, because it’s pretty simple, just a matter of how much mass there is between you and the radiation, and what that mass is made of. So just getting hunks of wood or metal should do the trick. I guess not though. I shouldn’t be surprised, this stuff is never as easy as it seems.
Don’t let me hurt your curiosity—DIY shelters are absolutely worth learning about, and disaster preparedness is synergistic. There’s a reason the CDC ran that “zombie apocalypse preparedness” campaign back in 2011 -- preparing for any one disaster tends to improve your preparedness for all of them. The actions to take to prepare for most disasters are fundamentally the same: Arrange for clean air, shelter, water, food, etc. For instance, when covid first hit, I had n95 masks on hand because I had set some aside expecting wildfire smoke to be a problem. I had hand sanitizer on hand because it’s useful for controlling disease if one’s supply of water is restricted—minimizing the water needed for hygiene means more for drinking, which buys more time to fix the supply problem. So I’d recommend starting with preparing for the disasters that with extremely high probabilities of affecting you, and pay attention to the ways in which that preparedness increases your odds of survival for lower-likelihood events like a nukes or zombies.
Look into how to harden your home against the types of disasters that it is most likely to experience. Watch videos of ember storms to update your model of how your home might survive a nearby wildfire. Learn where your water, electric, and gas shutoffs are so that you can stop a little household emergency while it’s happening. Do a fire drill; see whether any children in your home can actually open and escape from their bedroom windows when they hear the smoke alarm in the middle of the night. These are the kinds of disasters that threaten you with high probability, and will remain relevant for as long as modern civilization continues.
The drawback to making a disproportionate investment in nuclear shielding is the question of how you’ll find uncontaminated food, water, and air after surviving a hypothetical disaster. If you invest excessively in shielding and inadequately in the basic necessities, it’ll both lower your expected survival duration in most disasters (you will always need food, and only sometimes need to block radiation), and probably decrease your quality of life in the event that the expected disaster never arrives. The benefit to well-thought-out shielding is that it could also reduce the penetration of stray bullets into your home if you got unlucky, and potentially improve your home’s thermal efficiency and even fire and seismic resilience depending on what you use and how you use it. Having a basement, which is much like a bomb shelter, is massively useful for both food storage and sheltering vulnerable people from extreme heat events if there’s a power outage and you can’t run your A/C.
I’ve got a creative idea. What if you just had hunks of metal and basically made a little makeshift tipi out of them? I don’t see why that wouldn’t protect you from those initial gamma rays, or what other risks they might pose.
I think if you’re only concerned about shielding against the initial radiation, you might only need the shield between you and the blast.
I wonder how much metal it would actually take. How much would that cost, and weigh? this suggests that “a few inches of lead” would suffice. So let’s say we’re using the minimum viable lead sheet… If you’re lying or standing behind it, 2′ x 6′ would probably suffice. Say it’s 3″ thick, so roughly 3 cubic feet of lead. this says a cubic foot of lead is about 708lbs, so we’re looking at about 2124lbs of lead, give or take. If you need it thicker than that, it’ll obviously weigh more, at 1 cubic foot per inch at that size. Will the structure of your house be able to handle that kind of load where you’d like to put it? The lowest price estimate that a quick search turns up is $1 per pound, which would make such a shield expensive enough to warrant budgeting for but not out of reach on a tech salary.
My impression of the health risk of a nuclear event is that radioactive particles in the environment persist for quite a long time and create health hazards. I get this impression mostly from having visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone and experienced the strict security protocols making sure nobody left with even radioactive dirt on their clothes. While nuclear-blast doses of gamma radiation will definitely kill you right away, I don’t actually know how to quantify the risk of being near all the radioactive stuff if you came out from behind a person-sized radiation shield immediately after a blast.
Thanks for doing that research! Seems a bit much, price-wise and risk of screwing up (in my case) my apartment floor-wise.
But at the same time, it does strike me as a plausible route to go down. This diagram indicates that the radiation levels go down pretty rapidly. So if you could hang out in that little person-sized space for, I don’t know, 12 hours or so, maybe that’d mostly eliminate the risk? It would certainly be uncomfortable. But since this is a situation where your life depends on it, it doesn’t seem too bad. And you could pay more money to have more space if you’d like.
And if you combine it with, say, a $25 P100 mask + eye goggles after you exit your metal shield, my understanding is that the big thing is you don’t want radioactive fallout particles entering your body. The P100 + goggles + not eating/drinking anything radioactive should basically eliminate that risk. So yeah, this actually sounds kinda plausible.
Hello, neighbor! I am rural in your general part of the world, and disaster preparedness has been among my hobbies for most of my life, so I have a few comments!
I notice that you seem to treat personal risks from WWIII as an isolated event, whereas I see it as more of a continuum. It’s like talking about the risks from covid only if one personally contracts the virus, versus considering the bigger picture of risks where the virus itself is one factor but other factors include supply chain interruptions from a combination of worker sickness and policy responses, interruptions of access to medical care even if the medical problem is unrelated to the virus, and so forth. One example of such an effect that I’d expect if the US was participating in a hypothetical WWIII is that the resources we typically use for wildland firefighting would be busy, so wildfires (started by lightning, to say nothing of those which might be intentionally set) could be expected to threaten more property (especially rural and suburban) and run uncontained for longer, generating a lot more smoke which people in cities would have to try not to breathe due to its health risks, and we’ve known for a very long time that masks keep particulates out of the lungs so you’ll still want n95s. Semi-unrelatedly, if that earthquake we’re overdue for manages to wreck the west coast, Bend will be the nearest airport so if you’re living there it’d be prudent to consider the nonzero possibility of a flood of refugees coming through at some point.
Covid has highlighted to me that the value of life in various possible futures may differ. One can, without inconsistency, place a high value on life in a world like we knew in 2019, a slightly lower value on life that is spent entirely like we spent 2020, and a lower still value of being the only survivor in a radioactive wasteland.
One thing that comes up late in discussions of preparedness and makes many people quite uncomfortable at first is fully grasping the idea that nobody can survive everything. No matter how prepared you get, there will be some disasters that you simply cannot prepare for. You just get unlucky and bam, you’re dead. I cannot reasonably prevent a meteorite from crashing through my ceiling and smashing my skull open. I cannot reasonably prevent a hidden congenital vascular defect in my heart or brain from deciding that today is the day it stops keeping my blood in the proper tubing. I cannot reasonably prevent some driver from losing control of their vehicle and running me over while I’m walking down the sidewalk. There is always a “welp, guess I’ll die” condition to any preparedness plan, so figuring out where yours is can help dispel the illusion of obligation to prep for certain particularly extreme eventualities.
Hazmat suits probably won’t help too much, unless you’re doing highly specialized tasks and have the training to use them. Masks probably will help, because lungs are for air and explosions kick up a lot of dust and other crud you don’t want to breathe. Also, there will probably be more fire around (especially in the summer, around here) and breathing smoke is really bad for you.
IMO, there’s a surprising overlap between items that’d be genuinely useful in a disaster and items that are already useful in providing aid to the homeless. I think that useful items are the things that people can’t make themselves, and which reduce the incidence and transmission of sickness. Even if your area isn’t directly affected, it’ll probably be second-order affected by an influx of refugees, hopefully on their way to ports and airports to relocate to less-affected parts of the world. Simple stuff that people no longer make for themselves and yet need to avoid disease include soap, toothbrushes, and clean socks. Hats and blankets, too, in the winter. Water bottles, toilet paper. Perhaps camping style water filters—the Sawyer Mini works fine and can be had for pretty cheap. These things keep basically forever, can be usefully donated if you decide you don’t want to be prepared with them after all, and could be massively useful to make things suck less if society falls apart for a bit.
Also, pick up a copy of the book Where There Is No Doctor (published by Hesperian). It reads a bit like simple english wikipedia, but it’s a great resource for deciding what to treat at home versus what it’s worth making a risky trip to medical aid for if you don’t have the kind of urgent care access available that we’ve gotten used to.
Whatever you do, don’t bury a shipping container. They’re only meant to withstand forces downward on the corners, and can collapse with you in them if you pile soil on the sides and roof and then the soil multiplies in weight as it gets wet. Getting the airflow right in any DIY’d shelter is pretty challenging, although there are some companies which sell actual engineered shelters if you’re willing to pay the premium to get it from specialists.
This intersects with risk assessment for other possible disasters. For instance, moving to Bend makes you a lot safer from that big earthquake, yet puts you at greater risk of impact from gas price fluctuations (since so much stuff is trucked there).
Thinking about places that an enemy might want to destroy, it’s also not that hard to imagine a future in which datacenters are appealing targets. Facebook has a DC in Prineville right next to Bend, and I think Google has stuff in the Dalles. Folks are quiet about it, but DCs seem to pop up wherever there’s good hydroelectric power, probably for the combination of cheap electricity, cheap land, and easy access to cold water for thermal management.
Hi! How cool!
I have mixed feelings about this. I definitely agree with the continuum idea. There’s an A% chance that life is X% as valuable as it was. B% chance that it is Y% as valuable. C% chance that it is Z% as valuable. Etc. However, thinking about it that way is difficult. It is easier to just think about it as if there is an A% chance of this single bad thing happening. And making things easier to think about is very useful. When things are difficult to think about, it is tempting to just throw your hands in the air and call it quits.
I think that it makes sense to use some sort of multiplier. Look at those values for X, Y, Z, etc, and try to estimate what the average is. For example, maybe on average life is 10% as good as it used to be post nuclear attack. So instead of using, say, $10M as your value for life, you’d use $1M. Eg. that $1M figure acts as some sort of summary of the continuum you describe. Same with looking at the probabilities.
Great point. I agree. We should accept defeat in certain scenarios and seek out a good “bang for our buck”.
Good know know, thanks.
Yeah. This is seeming like one of the things worth doing. Although I personally am already stocked up on N95s and also have a P100.
Wow, good to know! This helped me update some incorrect beliefs. I had previously been thinking that DIY shelter might be worth exploring, because it’s pretty simple, just a matter of how much mass there is between you and the radiation, and what that mass is made of. So just getting hunks of wood or metal should do the trick. I guess not though. I shouldn’t be surprised, this stuff is never as easy as it seems.
Just a thought on this portion of the exploration. It’s definitely easier to think about the simplified world, but that simplification will impact your option-set as well, and you’ll miss out on value in a whole lot of the actual probability space, because you collapsed it into a different scenario.
You can’t avoid it completely—there are simply too many possibilities and actions to consider in a human brain in a reasonable amount of time. But quantizing to 3-5 scenarios can be a lot more useful than just 2, and will help counteract some of the human biases that crop up if you’re thinking in binary terms.
Very good point, thanks for making it. I think I probably simplify too much. I like the advice to quantize to 3-5 scenarios. I think it’ll help prompt me to get a better feel for my actual option-set, like you said. Making a mental note to do this more in general moving forward.
Don’t let me hurt your curiosity—DIY shelters are absolutely worth learning about, and disaster preparedness is synergistic. There’s a reason the CDC ran that “zombie apocalypse preparedness” campaign back in 2011 -- preparing for any one disaster tends to improve your preparedness for all of them. The actions to take to prepare for most disasters are fundamentally the same: Arrange for clean air, shelter, water, food, etc. For instance, when covid first hit, I had n95 masks on hand because I had set some aside expecting wildfire smoke to be a problem. I had hand sanitizer on hand because it’s useful for controlling disease if one’s supply of water is restricted—minimizing the water needed for hygiene means more for drinking, which buys more time to fix the supply problem. So I’d recommend starting with preparing for the disasters that with extremely high probabilities of affecting you, and pay attention to the ways in which that preparedness increases your odds of survival for lower-likelihood events like a nukes or zombies.
Look into how to harden your home against the types of disasters that it is most likely to experience. Watch videos of ember storms to update your model of how your home might survive a nearby wildfire. Learn where your water, electric, and gas shutoffs are so that you can stop a little household emergency while it’s happening. Do a fire drill; see whether any children in your home can actually open and escape from their bedroom windows when they hear the smoke alarm in the middle of the night. These are the kinds of disasters that threaten you with high probability, and will remain relevant for as long as modern civilization continues.
The drawback to making a disproportionate investment in nuclear shielding is the question of how you’ll find uncontaminated food, water, and air after surviving a hypothetical disaster. If you invest excessively in shielding and inadequately in the basic necessities, it’ll both lower your expected survival duration in most disasters (you will always need food, and only sometimes need to block radiation), and probably decrease your quality of life in the event that the expected disaster never arrives. The benefit to well-thought-out shielding is that it could also reduce the penetration of stray bullets into your home if you got unlucky, and potentially improve your home’s thermal efficiency and even fire and seismic resilience depending on what you use and how you use it. Having a basement, which is much like a bomb shelter, is massively useful for both food storage and sheltering vulnerable people from extreme heat events if there’s a power outage and you can’t run your A/C.
I’ve got a creative idea. What if you just had hunks of metal and basically made a little makeshift tipi out of them? I don’t see why that wouldn’t protect you from those initial gamma rays, or what other risks they might pose.
I think if you’re only concerned about shielding against the initial radiation, you might only need the shield between you and the blast.
I wonder how much metal it would actually take. How much would that cost, and weigh? this suggests that “a few inches of lead” would suffice. So let’s say we’re using the minimum viable lead sheet… If you’re lying or standing behind it, 2′ x 6′ would probably suffice. Say it’s 3″ thick, so roughly 3 cubic feet of lead. this says a cubic foot of lead is about 708lbs, so we’re looking at about 2124lbs of lead, give or take. If you need it thicker than that, it’ll obviously weigh more, at 1 cubic foot per inch at that size. Will the structure of your house be able to handle that kind of load where you’d like to put it? The lowest price estimate that a quick search turns up is $1 per pound, which would make such a shield expensive enough to warrant budgeting for but not out of reach on a tech salary.
My impression of the health risk of a nuclear event is that radioactive particles in the environment persist for quite a long time and create health hazards. I get this impression mostly from having visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone and experienced the strict security protocols making sure nobody left with even radioactive dirt on their clothes. While nuclear-blast doses of gamma radiation will definitely kill you right away, I don’t actually know how to quantify the risk of being near all the radioactive stuff if you came out from behind a person-sized radiation shield immediately after a blast.
Thanks for doing that research! Seems a bit much, price-wise and risk of screwing up (in my case) my apartment floor-wise.
But at the same time, it does strike me as a plausible route to go down. This diagram indicates that the radiation levels go down pretty rapidly. So if you could hang out in that little person-sized space for, I don’t know, 12 hours or so, maybe that’d mostly eliminate the risk? It would certainly be uncomfortable. But since this is a situation where your life depends on it, it doesn’t seem too bad. And you could pay more money to have more space if you’d like.
And if you combine it with, say, a $25 P100 mask + eye goggles after you exit your metal shield, my understanding is that the big thing is you don’t want radioactive fallout particles entering your body. The P100 + goggles + not eating/drinking anything radioactive should basically eliminate that risk. So yeah, this actually sounds kinda plausible.