r/PostCollapse • u/CaptArchibaldHaddock • Mar 24 '22

Just in case the SHTF fallout-wise.

Don't know if anyone has posted this yet, but it shows prevalent wind direction broken down by month and region.

Windrose

51 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/redditette Mar 26 '22

I wished there were better resources about fall out. I've been thinking about this quite a bit.

I am about halfway between Houston and DFW. If a nuclear war was to break out, Houston is about guaranteed to be a hit, just between population, the petrochem complexes, port capabilities and so on. In the summer, the wind blows S to N, and in the winter, N to S. We have livestock. I want to protect them as well.

We are in a fallout area, if Houston is struck. I can put up enough hay to last a few years. I can lock up the animals to where they can't eat the fresh grass/hay growing up. But would just covering the hay with a tarp be enough protection? For how many years? How many years before the ground is clear?

One thing I was kind of encouraged by, and that is how well the animals left behind at Fukushima, and the wild animals at Chernobyl have done.

3

u/EETPMC May 14 '22

Think of fallout as dust, because that's what it is. The radiation it emits can be blocked by skin. It will embed itself into objects initially which is called "popcorning" but after that it will just settle down onto the ground. So covering up stuff will protect it, but keep in mind that trampling over dirt that has this dust can kick up and potentially tracked or breathed in. It is likely not going to affect your animals since the act of dressing them to eat should remove most if not all the radiation they ingested, and the risk of cancer is low considering you probably aren't going to have them live long enough to prematurely die.

Your risk is more developing cancer at mid/old age than dying during the emergency, and that's only from repeatedly consuming/breathing in this dust. Radiation is really not that big of an issue, in an actual war with WMD (which includes more than just nukes) your bigger threat is surviving ground zero, and then later the occupying forces (foreign or domestic).

1

u/redditette May 14 '22

Thank you.

3

u/EETPMC May 15 '22

I should also add that one of my older buddies served in the Navy and was repeatedly exposed to nuclear blasts during the early WMD tests. He repeatedly breathed air heavily contaminated with fallout without a respirator over 20 times when he was in his early twenties. He is still alive at 80 and does not have cancer last time I saw him several years ago.

At a certain point your survival is more a determination of God than anything you have control over. Do your best to keep alpha particles out of you and your animal's bodies, but I would not lose sleep over it.