According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, these minutes are critical to survival. You have only about 10 to 15 minutes to get to shelter before massive amounts of toxic fallout falls to earth. How Quickly Do You Need to Get Inside a Fallout Shelter? In a shelter with a PF of 200, you would receive 1/200 th of the dose you would have received in the open. How well a shelter protects against fallout is measured as Protective Factor (PF). This is why many fallout shelters are built in basements or abandoned mines: the layers of dirt provide natural protection against fallout. The more material you have between you and the fallout, the more protection you will have. What Makes a Good Fallout Shelter?įallout shelters need to be made from thick layers of dense material. It lets you map a nuclear bomb’s blast area and fallout distance and even lets you change wind direction to see how far fallout would blow. By getting into a shelter quickly, you can avoid the lethal fallout levels immediately after the blast. Instead, the purpose of a fallout shelter is to protect you from the radioactive particles falling from the sky. It is not meant to help you survive the destruction from a nuclear bomb.Įven if you had enough warning to get to a bomb shelter, experts generally agree that a nuclear bomb would vaporize everything within 0.3 miles of Ground Zero. What Are Fallout Shelters?Ĭontrary to what some people think, a fallout shelter is not the same as a bomb shelter.

While you hopefully never will need this information, it can’t hurt to know where fallout shelters are located nearby and what to do if a nuclear alert goes off. This “delayed fallout” could cause radioactive particles to fall all over the earth – which is why knowing where a fallout shelter is essential, even if you don’t live near a potential target. Wind and rain can cause fallout to spread far away from the blast site. You’d need to immediately get in a fallout shelter to avoid getting poisoned. The radioactive debris then falls back to the earth, contaminating everything it touches. The fireball would shoot miles into the atmosphere – pulling dirt and debris with it. If a nuclear bomb were to hit, the blast would create a massive fireball which would vaporize everything nearby.

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