When I lived in Washington DC instead of shelters everyone had an assigned route for escaping the city by car.
We have an interesting app here in Switzerland - AlertSwiss. It uses your location to warn you about local dangers, like toxic air from a building fire, to landslides, to bad water warnings... you can also see all alerts in Switzerland on a map of the country. Currently there are a couple of landslides and some fires.
[The large public ones](https://palvelukartta.hel.fi/fi/service/815) are even on published maps. There are lots more than these, though, as any residential building with enough residents need to have their own one built. This means that virtually all buildings have one, though usually it is only up to spec of the year when the building was built. I once lived in a building built in the early 1900s, and even it had a bombshelter in the basement, though very crude by todays standard.
..collapsed parking garage with four stories above you of reinforced concrete rubble and knotted, melted, corkscrewed rebar? Respect the Swiss, they have a history of collectively trying harder than anyone else.
So maybe the scenario you describe was always the plan.
After all: Publishing a plan that instills a feeling of preparedness is a lot less costly than building a system that actually works.
So sure, why not?
[1]: https://footagefarm.com/reel-details/nuclear/atomic-bomb/duc... is an example of a tired old film, and I distinctly recall it being shown to my class in a public school sometime in the 1980s. Even though big parts of it were already rather outdated by that time.
Even though neither I nor my classmates were never alive and aware at a time when Civil Defense was a thing.
(Thattaboy, Tony.)
I was caught up in an evacuation situation on Hilton Head Island where a hurricane turned unexpectedly and the island was evacuated. We were literally packing up to leave for our scheduled departure, so we were close to the front.
Within 15 minutes, the roads were bonkers. Gas stations were out of gas within an hour, and the traffic was beyond insane took about 3-4 hours to get out.
This was in the Fall in a well connected vacation town, not even peak season. People were not panicking. The police and fire departments were present, prepared and professional.
If it were an initial war scenario, maybe 5% of people would get out, and once electricity was disrupted, the whole thing would immediately freeze.
The Swiss/Finn model is the only credible one and addresses only certain threats. They’re looking at protecting against fallout and conventional bombardment. All of the old US civil defense plans were designed around the notion of Russian bombers attacking US cities with atomic bombs, and said bombers getting intercepted by nuclear SAMs and nuclear air to air rockets. NYC, for example, was ringed with Nike batteries so in a war scenario you’d be looking at fallout (even if every bogey was intercepted) and and a disrupted power grid. It went to the wayside once the Soviets deployed ICBMs and hydrogen bombs.
For anyone in the Bay Area there is a Nike base north of the Golden Gate that has tours once or twic a week.
If you live within 10 miles of a US Nuclear Facility like me, NRC requires they send an annual calendar marked with siren-testing dates and escape-route maps. You can request free iodine tablets, for use while you're irradiated in traffic.
But IMHO both examples are mostly just coping mechanisms, designed to give panic direction.
Am I misunderstanding this? Why would artwork stop a war? If I’m fighting a war, I would not flinch at destroying eg the Mona Lisa, and I’m fairly certain heads of state wouldn’t either.
I could elaborate the entire context of my past comments, but that wouldn’t be communicating, that would be writing a dictionary.
bookofjoe•3mo ago