this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024

98 points (94.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35536 readers

1290 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.

Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.

Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What do to if I survive a nuclear blast in my city? (lemmy.autism.place)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

113 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

If you survive (big if) find Steve Huffman, he thinks he’ll be a good leader in a post apocalyptic earth

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Nuclear? In your city? You're dead in a matter of days... maybe months at best.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The first rule in rescue 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.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not joking here. Find a way to finish dying.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I live at the edge of a city but near a major airport. my biggest nuke fear is a bomb hits the city center that leaves me alive and the airport ones take awhile to arrive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Large bridges, airports, urban areas, any military installations, dams/hydroelectric, power plants, major train hubs, etc. are all targets in all-out nuclear war. You’ll need to actually think of how many things are targets and plot what not to be near.

Either way, all-out war would fuck the planet and probably set us back a century at best. If China survived they’d be the global power as they have the resources and manufacturing that the rest of the world has mostly given up, the rest would be completely decimated.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I used to live about three miles from Camp David. I figured I'd either be killed immediately or inside a defensive perimeter in the event of a war.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Is there even any nukeing the airport? Damage to the runway plus the EMP generated would probably prevent aircraft from taking off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I just assumed they would want to hit major infrastructure like airports, depots and such. Now my new fear is they don't nuke the airport at all. Im like at 3rd degree awefulness distance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

airstrips longer than 1600m (iirc) were at some point designated as strategic targets by soviets, so you assumed correctly

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

turns out that flat strips of concrete firmly attached to ground are pretty hard to damage

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What's the vault experiment? Are we giving him the box of puppets?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Good ol 77. Truly the best vault.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

But the authorities, and other people, may lie or not tell the entire truth. They tell you what they want you to know.

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I think the aspect of “hoarding” itself is the culprit here. Yes Karen, you can take 4 masks for you and your 3 kids. No karen, you don’t need 28 for every day of the week.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Just get some kind of remote control for starting it. That way you still decide when it does and doesn’t run

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes going outside in the first week is a very bad idea. However not because the radiation outside will instantly drop you. Much of the radiation will be coming from radioactive dust, known as fallout that'll be comprised of all kinds of isotopes. The isotopes that decay quickly release a lot of radiation over a short period and if you go outside you will come back covered in them. This will bring radiation into wherever you are using as your shelter. This would not just harm the person who went outside but everyone else sheltering with them. So do not go outside for any reason. You can make do without power for a while.

On a related note; keep water and food covered. Skin is a surprisingly good defense against radiation but breathing in this dust or letting it get into the food you eat or the water you drink is very dangerous. After a week has passed you should for your own safety keep the time spent outside your shelter as low as possible. Short trips outside will become safer as time goes on but activities that kick up dust will still be dangerous for a long time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think that I might rather get caught in the blast zone than deal with the fallout.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Your kit should include a firearm

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It does.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

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.

load more comments