RE: New York City's video on how to survive a nuclear attack.
January 8, 2023 at 10:52 pm
(This post was last modified: January 8, 2023 at 11:31 pm by Anomalocaris.)
recommending that people in metropolitan area go into sewers or subways is sheer idiocy. If they have to evacuate, it is reasonable to assume a somewhat unexpected attack is on the way. In such a scenario the maximum lead time before the warhead strikes is less than 30 minutes. most likely it would be less than 15-20 minutes. Optimistically give people 5 minutes to get to entreances to underground sewer and subway, Typical crowded fast moving escalator can move a maximum of 2000-4000 people an hour, say 3000 on average, or 750 in 15 minutes, There are 121 under ground subway station in Manhattan. Assuming both up and down escalators are used to move people down into subway, and there are on average 2 sets of up and down escalator per subway station, that works the ability to move 363,000 people into the subway in a very well organized 15-20 minute evacuation. Daytime population of manhattan is 3.5 million.
So efforts to evacuate large number of people into the sewers or subway will merely result in vast majority of the people trying to do so being caught in the open trying to get past the bottlenecks at the entrances to sewers and subways, and only a small percentage of people actually making it into any under group shelter.
for a general advice to evacuate underground to make sense, it would require most buildings to have basement access into such underground shelter. if that is not available, sheltering in place seems very likely to be the approach that leads to the most causality reduction possible under the circumstances of an imminent nuckear blast. certainly sheltering in place is better than milling out in the open trying to get into subway or sewer.
this is a situation where the difference in effect between the best and worst advice possible is not likely to be very large. but the advice that seeks to attain the best possible steady state which could not be achieved in the available warning time is certain to create a much worse end result than one that only seeks to achieve the least bad steady state possible s within the time available,
So efforts to evacuate large number of people into the sewers or subway will merely result in vast majority of the people trying to do so being caught in the open trying to get past the bottlenecks at the entrances to sewers and subways, and only a small percentage of people actually making it into any under group shelter.
for a general advice to evacuate underground to make sense, it would require most buildings to have basement access into such underground shelter. if that is not available, sheltering in place seems very likely to be the approach that leads to the most causality reduction possible under the circumstances of an imminent nuckear blast. certainly sheltering in place is better than milling out in the open trying to get into subway or sewer.
this is a situation where the difference in effect between the best and worst advice possible is not likely to be very large. but the advice that seeks to attain the best possible steady state which could not be achieved in the available warning time is certain to create a much worse end result than one that only seeks to achieve the least bad steady state possible s within the time available,
