Fred Allebach is a member of the City of Sonoma’s Community Services and Environmental Commission, and an Advisory Committee member of the Sonoma Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Fred is a member of Sonoma Overlook Trail Stewards, as well as Sonoma Valley Housing Group and Transition Sonoma Valley.
Practical advice for the coming nuclear war
I had hoped that a childhood filled with nuclear fear, and duck and cover drills was long over. Later, in the early 1980s, Gorbachev was my man, glasnost, perestroika; he ended the Cold War with great gestures of sanity. Boy that felt like a relief! Now it seems our fate is in the hands of two narcissistic, egotistical, insane madmen threatening nuclear war, one of whom happens to be the president of the United States. A nuclear checklist is in order.
Larbre, Friedman’s, Costco, Safeway, Napa Auto Parts, please give me a little kick back for the increased business…
If you have a well, call Larbre and get your well checked out and see if you can put it on dual power, with ability to run it separately by a generator. Do it fast; get the permits later. What if Trump gets his knickers in a twist and calls for a strike? The generator only needs to be big enough to run the well pump, and to charge cordless tools, and run corded power tools. You don’t need a huge generator. Don’t use the generator to run the house lights or refrigerator, too much gas, not necessary.
Learn exactly how to run the generator and the system you have. Have some spare gasoline on hand to run the generator, maybe 15 or 20 gallons, stored in five-gallon gas cans. Put gasoline stabilizer in the gas so it doesn’t lose its volatility.
If you don’t have a well, stockpile water in five gallon containers, and try to get with people who have wells and generators.
If you use gas to drive, that will use up energy resources necessary to get water from the well etc. Don’t go to the mountains; stay in town, band together. Save driving for absolute necessity. Banding together is the appropriate strategy, not hoarding and going it alone. Hoarders will eventually run out and then they will need help, better to share. A nuclear holocaust could be just the shock we need to move toward a more equitable society. Have mercy on the greedy, they may come around and find inner resources they didn’t know they had.
Consider a solar charging set-up, with marine battery storage, for 12 volt lights, and to charge laptops, etc. You can get this set-up at an RV supply store. This if there is enough sunlight to power solar systems and we don’t get into any nuclear winter, although nuclear winter could help us meet our climate 2050 goals.
In the event society collapses and there are no utilities, only use the generator to run the well and fill up water. Have maybe 50 gallons of water capacity to store in five gallon cans; or fill the pool if you have one, and then draw water from the pool. The chlorine will evaporate out in seven days. Keep pool covered from nuclear fallout. Wear a hat!
This will be survival for the long haul, like the miners in South America; resources will have to be meted out in a conservative way.
Get some regular bleach, not extra strength or scented, and an eye dropper. Use one drop of bleach per quart to treat water, if your water source is suspect. Hygiene will be very important, diarrhea and resulting dehydration may kill a lot of people. Don’t get water from creeks, as it may have fallout.
Stock up on OTC meds, other personal meds and First Aid supplies. Get iodine and take a bunch of that, it will prevent thyroid cancer caused by radioactive iodine poisoning.
Get five rolls of 1.5” Scotch brand regular blue tape, and an assortment of different size rolls of plastic, clear, black thick mil and thin mil plastic. You could use this to tape off windows from nuclear fallout, or for a shelter, many uses. Get coils of parachute cord, rope, and string etc., for multi-purpose use as well.
Get a bunch of Zip Loc bags, and other plastic bags: garbage bags, trash bags, contractor bags; these will come in handy for many things, gathering walnuts for example. But, what should we do when all material good are contaminated? We’ll have to surrender to that, no escape, have the grace to accept the things we cannot change…
Have a set of regular tools: screw drivers, pliers, hammer, staple gun, cordless drill, cordless sawz-all, cordless power saw. Cordless tools should all that take the same rechargeable battery type. Get a standard shovel, steel rake, ax, bow saws, and hand saws.
Municipal utility systems may not be working: water, gas, electric… it will all be like going camping and hiking. Be prepared to take care of toilet needs by digging a latrine. Or, get some five gallon buckets, with lids, line with a garbage bag, and poo poo in there until it’s full, no seat will be necessary. Then seal off the bag, dispose, and start again. Use lime, and leaves etc. to cover the smell. You won’t want to use your meager gasoline supplies to run the generator just to flush the toilet and run the septic pumps. Oh, and get some extra toilet paper, and when you run out, be prepared to use rocks and sticks like cave men did.
Get headlamps from REI and spare AAA batteries from Costco to run them. This can be your main source of light at night. Get one battery-powered table light, one that for example takes 4 D-cell batteries. Get plenty of spare batteries, and make sure they are fresh. Choose the latest expiration date possible from the stock available. Get some candles. Get three 5-packs of Bic lighters. The control of fire was one of our ancestor’s first great moves, don’t get caught without the ability to make fire! Wood is the paleo-energy source we all know how to deal with. With nuclear winter upon us, who cares about spare the air days?!
Make or buy fire starters. Home-made fire starters: get cardboard egg cartons and fill them with drier lint. Double boil blocks of paraffin wax in a # 10 can and soak the eggs carton spaces with melted wax; let dry. You only need @ 1/8 of one of these egg carton units to start dry wood, so, for example, three or four egg cartons worth of fire starters can last a good while. Only use fire for heat and functional stuff, not recreation. One home-made egg carton unit fire starter can start wet driftwood. This is good stuff. Cavemen would not believe it.
Get three five-gallon propane tanks at Wal-Mart and fill them at the Shell station on Broadway. Get a two-burner portable propane stove with hose attachment for the tanks at REI. Your regular kitchen utensils should be fine. If the nuclear fallout is heavy, you may have to risk some carbon monoxide to cook indoors with no windows open. Disable the carbon monoxide detector to relieve stress if it goes off.
Stockpile food: get a plastic olive oil barrel or two at Friedman’s, and fill with food that doesn’t have to be cooked, or that cooks fast. Fast cooking food saves fuel. For example, angel hair pasta cooks fast. Instant mashed potatoes, Lipton quick dinners, cous cous, etc., these are all good to bulk up on while saving fuel. One advantage here is that now you can afford to eat all the bad stuff you want. Get dried bacon at Costco, get salted cashews, high cholesterol will no longer matter. Go for it! Dehydrated food that takes a long time to cook is not good, unless you use your bad neighbor’s house for a wood source and cook on an open fire. Keep nutrition in mind: vitamins, fiber, canned veggie and fruit, Krave jerky, do like Mom said and get foods of all different colors.
Keep all these supplies in a corner of your garage where you can get at it, not under a crawl space where rats can eat it. Rats will chew right through your plastic containers if they smell food. (Rats may be on the upswing with nuclear war, buy stock now.) You don’t want to have dig stuff all out when you need it most. Ease of use is important. The whole garage may be needed as a nuclear staging area.
Good attitude, a can-do attitude with an appropriate amount of swagger is the best skill. All else falls into place from that. You can have all the stuff but if you don’t have the moxie to use it properly, what’s the point? As mentioned, banding together will be the best strategy. This nuclear war will be a low point from which the only way to go is up.
Keep musical instruments available for entertainment. Feed the musicians, poets and performance artists when they come around. Feed your handymen and empathetic do-gooders. Share your stockpile. Community good will can trump every dog for himself. Everyone find a place where they can help out. Count on your own abilities. Forgive and forget old animosities.
If government can’t get us affordable housing now without a nuclear holocaust, what makes you think government will save you with nukes all around? Don’t count on government. Maybe you will be helped by a Latino that you previously wanted to deport… and your opinion on Trump’s executive orders will change.
Consider getting two sawed-off, nine-shot shot guns (the Terminator had one), and a few pistols with magazines with a lot of shots, and plenty of extra ammo, in case push comes to shove. That way you can shoot many shots in succession. Unscrupulous people will come for your stuff and resources, so if you stockpile, prepare, and get ready, it is reasonable to defend what you have. Why get ready and then have marauders take your stuff? At least have a few machetes, knives, spears, pepper spray etc.
What will all the folks in Richmond do in a nuclear holocaust? They who have nothing to start with, and who have been ground under the wheel of exploitive capitalism. Well, they will come up here and see what’s cookin’ for dinner.
No, disregard those last two paragraphs, that type of thinking is what led to the nuclear holocaust in the first place, craziness, selfishness, not sharing resources… When push comes to shove, all are going to die anyway; it’s just a question of whether it will be sooner or later. Be like the good folks on the Titanic when they helped women and kids, and when they kept playing in the band even as the ship went down. Invite the strangers in, start a new era of compassion.
Do your best and keep your morals and values up to the very end, those are the things that make life worth living under any circumstance. It’s a shame that the world needs to be destroyed by crazy men to find a silver lining of goodness, but let’s get ready to do the right thing when the nukes hit the fan.
And remember, “those who gain experience while retaining a firm grip on a beginner’s state of mind become long-term survivors.” Quote by Laurence Gonzales, from his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why.
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Looks like North Korea will be able to hit the Bay Area soon, if not already; it would be a MAD attack, but the threat of it enters into the DPK’s deterrence formula. Countries (the US) will think twice about military action on them with a threat like this up their sleeve. At least we hope no one like Trump will be reckless, as millions will die by conventional attacks on South Korea alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/22/world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-weapons.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news