‘Shelters’ planned for 300,000 Alabama residents

Huntsville, AL (AHN) - City officials in Huntsville, Alabama are planning to open old-fashioned bomb shelters and explained their program to members of Congress. City officials say that although the plan wouldn't help if the city suffered a direct hit, the shelters would protect residents from the radioactive fallout from a nuclear strike elsewhere in the United States.

Huntsville will outfit an abandoned mine capable of holding 20,000 people. Other residents will be housed in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls. City planners hope they can develop enough shelter space to house 300,000 people; enough space to provide every person in Huntsville and the surrounding county a safe refuge.

City officials say that their plan is sensible given the fact that radioactive fallout would spread for hundreds of miles from the site of a nuclear bomb. In addition to that, the plan complies with post 9/11 instructions from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), calling on cities to create metropolitan protection programs that includes nuclear-attack preparation and mass shelters.

But most cities have confined that concept to what is called the "shelter-in-place" method that calls for residents to stay put in case of a "dirty bomb" and seal themselves off from danger. That method gave rise to jokes after cities told residents to protect themselves during a biological, chemical or nuclear attack by sealing up the room they were in with plastic and duct tape.

Huntsville also instructs its residents to use duct tape, but has decided to take the safe shelter concept a step further with actual bomb shelters.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7008654718

Dismantling all nuclear weapons is a much better idea.

deal effectively with any kind of disaster, natural or manmade. FEMA is a joke.

The folks in Huntsville talk in terms of nuclear strikes and dirty bombs, but I suspect their concerns are actually much closer to home.

Huntsville is about forty miles east of Browns Ferry Nuclear plant, recently re-started by the TVA. This installation is huge and old. During this past summer's drought and persistent heat wave, plant officials were surprised to find out the reactor's cooling system doesn't work very well during temperatures in excess of 95 degrees.

Because the TVA employees lots of folks in the region, the city's planning authorities probably can't just come out and say "Lookee heah: that nuke plant's come danged nigh to meltin' down more than oncet. Reckon maybe we oughta have a plan for when it 'vinchully does?"

So they talk about dirty bombs and nuclear strikes instead.



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