-Caveat Lector- >According to Commander Michael Dobbs, a policy planner on the Joint Staff, an >effective shelter program would cost $60 billion, 30 times the cost of >implementing a crisis relocation strategy in large cities. > >"Evacuation is still the primary protective measure in the event of a nuclear >incident, said Don Jacks of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. > >'Duck and Cover' > >Edwin Lyman, scientific director for Nuclear Control Institute, has evaluated >the state of affairs as nothing less than a return to the primitive Cold War >ritual of "duck and cover.
And one of the reasons there isn't widespread support for the "Duck and Cover" plan is due to the fact that it was widely discredited in the mid-80s, when the Reagan Administration strongly pushed it (altho as I pointed out to my fellow antinuke groupmates, much to their chagrin, the current 'Duck and Cover' plan was created and drafted under the prior Carter Administration).... The whole premise of the "Duck and Cover" plan is based on having sufficient warning of an impending 'nuclear event'; when this plan was created, it presumed the enemy would be the Soviet Union, and that escalating tensions would give enough warning... The idea was that the Soviets had a strong evacuation plan themselves, and developing our own evacuation plan was just one more 'weapon' to add to the MADD arsenal... The thing is, it turned out the Soviets never had as good a program as they implied; it looked good on paper, and that was it...in actual practice it couldn't have worked.... And that about describes the U.S. "Duck and Cover" program, too -- it was drawn up by desk jockies in DC who never went out into the field; in other words, they based the plan on documents, many of which were either out-of-date or were never accurate in the first place, and they never had anyone actually visit designated 'host sites' to see if they could really house the number of refugees they were told they would have to accept. Also, host cities were not allocated any funds to implement the program, meaning that they were being told that they would have to accept anywhere from 3 to 5 times their native population in refugees, but they weren't given any money to handle the influx... Case in point: I think it was in 1984 or 1985 when antinuke groups nationally organized a "Duck and Cover" weekend, where designated host sites would host representatives from the cities that were designated to evacuate to that particular site; in my case, our group was based in a city that had 5 towns in Vermont designated as host sites. The largest of these towns has a native population of around 25,000; the other 4 towns ranged in size from the smallest of around 185 people, to the largest being about 4,000. Taking all 5 towns together, you're talking about a native population of around 30,000, in a fairly rural area. The Connecticut city they were being told they would have to accept as refugees numbered arount 200,000 at the time.... Our Vermont hosts brought us around to see the buildings that were designated by FEMA as being adequate shelter for the refugees; the thing is, FEMA's plan was based on allocating a space just 5 feet long and 3 feet wide for each person. This space was supposed to be adequate not only for the person to lay down in, but to contain everything that person had brought with him or her, also... Now FEMA also had drawn up a list of all the 'stuff' evacuees were supposed to schlep up there with, which included a portable toilet (although FEMA never explained how hundreds of thousands of people were supposed to get their hands on a portable toilet on short notice), and a heavy wooden door, shovel, and lots of pillows and blankets (so that one could dig oneself a hole and cover oneself with the door and blankets and pillows when 'The Big One' dropped -- this was considered sufficient protection from radiation)...but if one DID successfully manage to trek up to Vermont with everything one was supposed to take, it was obvious that a space of 5 feet by 3 feet would not be enough to hold all of the stuff, let alone a human body... At one site our hosts had actually drawn a 5 foot by 3 foot grid on the floor, and we got a good picture of one of our group -- a guy who was 6'4" tall -- scrunched up in one of the spaces.... Another designated refugee housing site was the local hospital; the hospital director explained to us that he knew nothing of his hospital being put on a list by FEMA of refugee host sites until the local antinuke groups showed him the FEMA booklet. FEMA had never gotten in touch with him, had never discussed with him anything about it... This is a small hospital, with about a 100 or so beds. The director explained that most of the emergencies they get are broken limbs during ski season...in other words, it is not equipped to handle major catastrophes... The director took us on a tour to show us where we were supposed to be housed in the hospital, according to FEMA; this was down in the cellar, amongst the heating equipment and water pipes. The thing is, FEMA had based its choice on the number of refugees the hospital could hold, and where they would be put, on the original blueprints for the hospital, which had been built in the early 1950s... The thing was, the hospital director pointed out, changes had been made while the hospital was under construction, which meant the original blueprints were out-of-date the same year the hospital was built; the blueprints showed areas that never even existed, but those were some of the areas that FEMA had decided could house refugees. In addition, areas that DID coincide with the original blueprints were no longer usable...on the original blueprints these areas had been designated as storage, but in the 70s the hospital had added additional boilers plus had put in an airconditioning system, meaning that floor space was no longer available. But since FEMA never bothered sending anyone out to the field to actually inspect these designated sites, and instead relied on dated (and in most cases, outdated) blueprints, it was making decisions on how many people a building could host on floor space that in many cases didn't exist, and when it did the amount of space designated to each person was painfully inadequate... FEMA never bothered to come up with a plan on how these designated host cities were expected to feed the refugees, nor on how their water and sewage systems were expected to handle an increase of 3 to 5 times the number these systems had been designed to handle... And FEMA definitely did not address the issue of what would happen if this "Duck and Cover" plan had to be instituted in the dead of winter; one really has to read FEMA's booklet (which I have) to get the full flavor of surrealism it contains...in many ways it reads like a brochure for a summer camp, and we all were supposed to be happy (and brainless) campers looking forward to a few weeks camping out in the woods... BTW, while one was supposed to make sure to bring along a portable toilet and a heavy wooden door, weapons of all types were prohibited...altho it was never explained just HOW the authorities would make sure that this was enforced... And people in certain industries were prohibitted from evacuating, as their services were deemed necessary to aid others to evacuate; these included the obvious professions of police and medical personnel (including nurses aides and orderlies), but also anyone working in what was designated as 'food service'...this category included not only those people working in food processing plants and the trucking industry, but anyone working for a business that served food. The thought behind this, apparantly, was that evacuees would have to be fed, and after they left, those left behind would also have to be fed. It never seemed to cross the collective minds at FEMA that minimum-wage burger flippers, supermarket clerks, and nurses aides would rather evacuate with their families than stay behind at what was designated a ground zero site, and would quit their jobs to do so rather than risk getting fried by a nuke... This group of people were given evacuation sites much closer to home, a site usually 10 to 20 miles away, usually with some good size hills (if not outright mountains) in between; FEMA's logic was that the hills would block most of the initial blast radiation; FEMA never explained what people were supposed to do after the initial blast, if prevailing winds directed the residual radiation in their direction... In our city's case, the local evacuation site was about 10 miles away, at what was then a state mental hospital (the local FEMA rep we eventually buttonholed didn't seem to grasp the irony of this).... Which brings up another matter -- FEMA's "Duck and Cover" plan quite obviously glosses over what is expected to be done with the denizens of mental hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, etc. Hell, it ignores the fact that a good number of people in urban areas do not own cars, and therefore they would not be able to just jump in a vehicle and drive to a designated evacuation site. FEMA's plan does not cover providing transportation for such people, other than stating that the city in question should 'provide buses'.... FEMA's "Duck and Cover" plan was a straw tiger then, and remains so today; even on a limited basis (a localized 'biological event' as opposed to a nationwide 'nuclear event') it can't work, in good part because no funds are being allocated to the designated host sites to be able to adequately respond in such an emergency... Secondly, unless there are some sort of drills (much like the A-bomb drills done in my town when I was a kid), if and when an 'NBC' 'event' occurs, the painful fact of the matter is that the majority of people won't even understand what is going on, or be able to do anything about it once they DO understand....and for every one person who perhaps has both the will and the way to evacuate in a peaceful and orderly fashion, you will have at least one other person who decides they'd rather stay behind and loot, and yet another person who is peaceful and law-abiding but unable to evacuate because they don't have the means and who will be victimized by those who stay behind to loot... So the 'answer', if indeed there IS one, is that if there IS to be any sort of adequate program to respond to an NBC event, it has to encompass not only evacuation, but adequate shelter for those who are unable to evacuate -- and indeed funds will have to be provided to make sure that the plans that are set out on paper are actually 'do-able' in reality, and that would include funding to cover periodic drills... June <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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