State police released no details of the hikers’ identities or possible causes of death. Southern Nevada remains under an excessive heat warning; the high temperature Saturday was 114 degrees.

  • kklusz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s in case you’re sufficiently far from the blast radius that your greatest danger is flying glass shards and other debris. The people at ground zero are fucked no matter what of course, but a lot of people live in suburbs outside the city that could have their lives saved, or at the very least could avoid more serious injuries by ducking and covering.

    This sort of education actually already happened in Japan during WWII. There were multiple survivors from Hiroshima who saw sights such as this:

    He would recall passing a woman who seemed to have bluish leaves growing out of her flesh. She must have been standing near a stained glass window when the sky opened up, and the strange plants were in fact leaves of glass deeply rooted in one whole side of her body. She walked by without uttering a word or a sound, like a ghost; but with each step, the leaves chimed with what seemed, to a boy of six, like a strange jingle-jangle tune.

    That’s why you duck and cover, because in case you find yourself still alive after the blast, you do not want to want to be someone with so much glass embedded in them that they look like jingling vegetation. Depending on your distance from the blast, there will be a few seconds between the flash of the atomic bomb and when the blast wave hits, and those few seconds are an opportunity to save yourself from a lot of unnecessary pain afterwards.

    Some of these Hiroshima survivors went on to Nagasaki, where they would educate everyone they came across on their experiences in Hiroshima. This is just one such account:

    Almost from the moment Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Hisako arrived home with their child, neighbors started arriving at the door, wanting to know what Mr. Yamaguchi had seen in Hiroshima. He was nauseous and fatigued and his fever felt as if it were still climbing; but he decided to answer every question, and offer advice: “Wear white clothes—which will reflect the heat rays. Black clothes tend to catch fire easily. Keep all of the windows open, because if glass shards are stuck in the body, treatment is very difficult. And if you see the pika, you must at that very moment hide yourself behind a sturdy object.”

    He hoped that his advice to his neighbors was unnecessary. He prayed that the white flash and the black cloud would not follow him to Nagasaki. He hoped so, but he really did not believe so.

    That all happened within 3 days, man. Just 3 days after the first atomic bombing, humanity was already learning how to adapt to atomic bombs. They teach you “duck and cover” because that’s literally what Hiroshima survivors had taught Nagasaki survivors 78 years ago. But of course they should’ve explained the historical context to you so that it was clear why such knowledge is useful.

    In case anyone reading this is interested, the quotes are from the book “To Hell and Back: The Last Train From Hiroshima.” It’s a fantastic book with many more vivid accounts than the two I just picked out.

    • dgilluly@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Maybe some more context.

      At my particular alma mater, the window line was below the desks a bit. And a lot of them were close to the windows. Using the ducking under the desks as protection against the auxiliary blast radius would still be a bit dangerous, as one would still catch glass shards in the head and possibly the neck.

      Better idea IMO, gather the students along an interior wall, have them sit on the floor, and tip a few desks over to protect them.

      Edit: From my understanding nuclear bombs detonate pretty high above the ground. That would push the glass shards downward when they implode. My school had the safety windows which probably wouldn’t open enough to keep them from shattering from a force like that. So yeah, at least for the first few rows from the windows, it would ricochet a bunch of it between the floor and the desks. Essentially turning that area into a walking glass wind chime making zone.

      Honestly, if I was at work or at home and got a message that there was an incoming nuke which I would be in the aux blast zone for, I’d find the most interior room or closet I could, and just chill in there. I think that’s the best place. Hard to get impaled with broken glass if you’re not in the same room as glass.

      • kklusz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Oh wow, yeah ducking wouldn’t help so much if you’re ducking to be at face level with glass 😬

        Hopefully we’ll never have to find out. Chilling in an interior room is probably a good call, the closest survivors to the Hiroshima ground zero were cocooned inside a bank vault.

    • CeruleanRuin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      We often fail to teach our children WHY and hope that teaching them WHAT is enough. For some kids this might be the right approach, but I believe this is selling most of them short, and depriving them of the vital context that would allow them to adapt in a real situation.

      We keep them in the dark so as not to terrify them, but kids are smart, they know why they do shelter in place drills, and if they have gotten that far, they will be rightly terrified anyway. If we’re going to go through the motions, we might as well empower them with the added information that might actually save their life someday.