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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Fun anecdote: about a decade ago I spent some time at the National Lab that's right next door to this site. They made you wear dosimeters at all times, even if you weren't anywhere near the nuke stuff. If it was your first time, they gave you a guidebook to what all the alarms, sirens, klaxons and bells meant and what to do if you heard them.

Things like, "a high pitched alarm with a bell is a fire alarm, evacuate the building to a designated evacuation point and wait"

or "a siren with no flashing strobes means that you should move quickly to a designated decontamination area and begin decontamination procedures"

the one that that everybody thought was both scary and fun "if you hear 'the howler', run"

no indication of direction or location to meet, just...scatter to the four winds

nobody asked under what conditions you might hear this "howler"

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I had an internship at Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory almost two years ago; we got similar directions related to alarms, klaxons, etc. They had two kind of alarms. A ringing bell meant basically "there's a fire, leave the building". The other one was a high-pitched alarm that meant "something bad (likely nuclear) is going on, find a nearest building (or stay in it if you're already there), close all windows, shut down air conditioning and wait".

Another funny anecdote from that place: one day we got an e-mail related to some power problems we experienced earlier. The message suggested to avoid using some part of the parking lot near the transformers, as there was a slight chance that an explosion could eject the doors of the transformer station.

Four winds? Unless you have other indications (direction of boom, light flash, mushroom cloud), go upwind. If upwind is an obviously bad idea, orthogonal to the wind may be better than downwind, especially if you cannot move fast.

So what do you do when it changes direction. Keep it simple, just get away as fast and far away as possible.

Look at the graph in http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/er/planning-guidance-for-r..., pages 29, 31, and 32. You can be well outside the 'minimal damage' zone, but inside the 'dangerous fallout' zone for miles.

For an extreme non-nuclear example, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster#The_disaster: "12 passengers from the rear of the train who successfully broke a window followed the advice of another escaped passenger who had been a volunteer fire fighter for 20 years, and travelled downward past the fire and below the smoke."

You may be hosed either way, but choices you make can have huge effects on your chances.

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