In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

By coincidence two days after the attempted bombing in Times Square, the new issue of  The New Yorker has a good article, “Fallout,” written by Nick Paumgarten, which looks at the possibility of a nuclear device being detonated by terrorists in New York City.

The piece focuses on Irwin Redliner, the head of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, who points out there are actually things that citizens can do to prepare for and respond to such an event. Though the article also notes the challenge in getting people to believe that:

The idea of preparedness, during the Cold War, was absurd, a fantasy; a full-tilt exchange of warheads would have been unsurvivable, and so, as people came to recognize the futility of the Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era placebos and sops (duck-and-cover, Bert the Turtle, back-yard fallout shelters), they stopped thinking about preparing. Prevention was all. But a terrorist attack is different: harder to prevent, easier to survive.

“There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario,” he said. “But we’re still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile.” Redlener took out a loaf of bread and began making a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. “There’s a fatalism that clouds the planning process. It’s frustrating. It’s been shown that your odds of survival can be significantly improved with a relatively small amount of planning. I could put it all on a card.”

In the article, Redlener sketches out a possible nuclear bomb scenario in Manhattan and explains what citizens should do:

So suppose a ten-kiloton bomb—smaller than the one that fell on Hiroshima—detonated on Wall Street, eight miles south. Redlener looked out the window. “The first thing we’d see is a tremendous flash of light,” he said. “Don’t look at it, if you can help it. It could blind you.” But if you can see it, how can you not look at it? Never mind. “We’d have between fifteen and thirty seconds to get over to the core,” he went on—meaning the center of the building, by the elevators, away from the windows, which the blast wave would shatter. He grabbed a little red emergency kit and started down the hall, ambling past the cubicles, at a dry-run pace. The kit contained sixteen ounces of water, a battery-operated radio, nutrition bars, a whistle, a flashlight, and some gauze pads. The peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich he left behind.

By the core, you collect yourself, and then take the stairs down to the basement, or to the most accessible sheltered area, in preparation for the first shower of highly radioactive fallout, fifteen or so minutes after the blast. Redlener headed down five stories to the parking garage. The fallout-shelter signs that you still see all over the city, hardy relics of the early sixties, are ghosts; the well-fortified basements they allude to are no longer stocked with supplies. But in a one-bomb scenario they might still do the trick. “Fallout shelters are like bell-bottoms,” he said. “They’ve gone in and out of favor. They are now coming back into favor.”

Redlener explained that, in the event, he would spend at least four hours in the parking garage, monitoring the radio for news regarding the orientation of the radioactive plume, to plot an evacuation route. “Don’t go to Long Island,” he said. It’s something of a dead end. You want a place to escape to, hours outside of town—an agreed-upon rendezvous spot for family members. To get messages to and from them, you should have an out-of-state landline number, of, say, a cousin or a friend.