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Nuclear Survival Shelters
In a nuclear survival situation the first and most important step to survival is securing a shelter. Learning how to improvise different nuclear survival shelters could greatly enhance your chances in a nuclear disaster.

Nuclear Survival Shelters

Shelter Site Selection and Preparation
To reduce your exposure time and thereby reduce the dosage received, remember the following factors when selecting and setting up a shelter:
Where possible, seek a crude, existing shelter that you can improve. If none is available, dig a trench.

Dig the shelter deep enough to get good protection, then enlarge it as required for comfort.

Cover the top of the fighting position or trench with any readily available material and a thick layer of earth, if you can do so without leaving the shelter. While a roof and camouflage are both desirable, it is probably safer to do without them than to expose yourself to radiation outside your fighting position. While building your shelter, keep all parts of your body covered with clothing to protect it against beta burns.

Clean the shelter site of any surface deposit using a branch or other object that you can discard. Do this cleaning to remove contaminated materials from the area you will occupy. The cleaned area should extend at least 1.5 meters beyond your shelter’s area.

Decontaminate any materials you bring into the shelter. These materials include grass or foliage that you use as insulation or bedding, and your outer clothing (especially footgear). If the weather permits and you have heavily contaminated outer clothing, you may want to remove it and bury it under a foot of earth at the end of your shelter. You may retrieve it later (after the radioactivity decays) when leaving the shelter. If the clothing is dry, you may decontaminate it by beating or shaking it outside the shelter’s entrance to remove the radioactive dust. You may use any body of water, even though contaminated, to rid materials of excess fallout particles. Simply dip the material into the water and shake it to get rid of the excess water. Do not wring it out, this action will trap the particles.

If at all possible and without leaving the shelter, wash your body thoroughly with soap and water, even if the water on hand may be contaminated. This washing will remove most of the harmful radioactive particles that are likely to cause beta burns or other damage. If water is not available, wipe your face and any other exposed skin surface to remove contaminated dust and dirt. You may wipe your face with a clean piece of cloth or a handful of uncontaminated dirt. You get this uncontaminated dirt by scraping off the top few inches of soil and using the “clean” dirt.

Upon completing the shelter, lie down, keep warm, and sleep and rest as much as possible while in the shelter. When not resting, keep busy by planning future actions, studying your maps, or making the shelter more comfortable and effective.

Don’t panic if you experience nausea and symptoms of radiation sickness. Your main danger from radiation sickness is infection. There is no first aid for this sickness. Resting, drinking fluids, taking any medicine that prevents vomiting, maintaining your food intake, and preventing additional exposure will help avoid infection and aid recovery. Even small doses of radiation can cause these symptoms which may disappear in a short time.

Nuclear Survival Natural Shelters

Terrain that provides natural shielding and easy shelter construction is the ideal location for an emergency shelter. Good examples are ditches, ravines, rocky outcropping, hills, and river banks. In level areas without natural protection, dig a fighting position or slit trench.

Trenches

When digging a trench, work from inside the trench as soon as it is large enough to cover part of your body thereby not exposing all your body to radiation. In open country, try to dig the trench from a prone position, stacking the dirt carefully and evenly around the trench. On level ground, pile the dirt around your body for additional shielding. Depending upon soil conditions, shelter construction time will vary from a few minutes to a few hours. If you dig as quickly as possible, you will reduce the dosage you receive.

Other Shelters

While an underground shelter covered by 1 meter or more of earth provides the best protection against fallout radiation, the following unoccupied structures (in order listed) offer the next best protection:

Caves and tunnels covered by more than 1 meter of earth.

Storm or storage cellars.

Culverts.

Basements or cellars of abandoned buildings.

Abandoned buildings made of stone or mud.

As stated earlier, the shielding material’s effectiveness depends on its thickness and density. An ample thickness of shielding material will reduce the level of radiation to negligible amounts. The primary reason for finding and building a shelter is to get protection against the high-intensity radiation levels of early gamma fallout as fast as possible.

Five minutes to locate the shelter is a good guide. Speed in finding shelter is absolutely essential. Without shelter, the dosage received in the first few hours will exceed that received during the rest of a week in a contaminated area. The dosage received in this first week will exceed the dosage accumulated during the rest of a lifetime spent in the same contaminated area.

Roofs

It is not mandatory that you build a roof on your shelter. Build one only if the materials are readily available with only a brief exposure to outside contamination.

If building a roof would require extended exposure to penetrating radiation, it would be wiser to leave the shelter roofless. A roof’s sole function is to reduce radiation from the fallout source to your body. Unless you use a thick roof, a roof provides very little shielding.

You can construct a simple roof from a poncho anchored down with dirt, rocks, or other refuse from your shelter. You can remove large particles of dirt and debris from the top of the poncho by beating it off from the inside at frequent intervals. This cover will not offer shielding from the radioactive particles deposited on the surface, but it will increase the distance from the fallout source and keep the shelter area from further contamination.

Shielding Materials

The thickness required to weaken gamma radiation from fallout is far less than that needed to shield against initial gamma radiation. Fallout radiation has less energy than a nuclear detonation’s initial radiation. For fallout radiation, a relatively small amount of shielding material can provide adequate protection. Figure 23-1 gives an idea of the thickness of various materials needed to reduce residual gamma radiation transmission by 50 percent.

Dozer Trench
When engineer support is available, a dozer trench about 2.7 meters (9 feet) wide and 1.2 meters (4 feet) deep can be dug (Figure B-2). The length of the trench will be determined by the number of patients/personnel to be sheltered. About 0.6 meter (2 feet) length of trench for each person to be sheltered is required.

These trenches reduce exposure of personnel lying on the floor to about 20 to 30 percent of the radiation that they would receive in the open. Protection and comfort can be improved, as time permits, by digging the trenches deeper; undercutting the walls (care must be taken in this option; the earth may cave in); erecting tents over the trenches; and providing improved flooring.
When used with other individual and collective protection measures, dozer trenches provide adequate fallout shelters for most situations; they can be provided in a minimum of time and effort. Trenches should not be dug in areas subject to flooding during rain storms. In sandy soil undercutting will not be possible; also some form of support to keep the walls from caving in will be required.

Sandbag walls around the hospital tents as shown in Figure B-4, or lightly constructed buildings provide protection from fallout. Sandbag walls 1.2 meters (4 feet) high give significant protection (20 to 40 percent transmission factor); however, the effort required to achieve the protection is such that it is marginally feasible. Sandbagging is an effective means for supplementing other shelters by– Bolstering the shielding at weak points. Forming baffles at entryways. Blocking open ends of trenches. Covering windows and gaps.