The two animal floor and food storage extension areas were connected to the main shelter area via large doors. Each extension area floor had a sloped and battened access that our animals could walk down, and later up, with relative ease and little risk. The battens, however, later proved a problem when removing heavy items from the shelter with our trailers. It was then that we discovered the benefit of a trailer with larger wheels that was better able to transit the battens when we recovered that trailer from the house.
The bottom floor of the extension area was used for the storage of essential material; this being mainly food that we had obtained just before the final closure of our shelter. The tins were stored on shelves, the vacuum packed food was stored in piles and the Jamon and other dried or salted meats were arranged in order of use and hung from the roof. By this time we were confident that our food resources would, with reasonable care, be sufficient, with our then numbers, for some time beyond our original ten years.
There were two primary entrances into the shelter. Both these were via access doors opening inwards to the shelter. This was necessary because the amount of material potentially resting above the doors, after the shelter was finally closed, might cause problems if opening upward. The main access for large items and animals was the door through the roof of the habitation floor extension area. This door was a large, strong, very heavy, single element system that dropped onto the access slope. It was raised and lowered by a pulley system on a large A frame, stored in the house, assisted, from below, by large hydraulic jacks provided by the builder. It was through this entrance that the animals entered and much later left the shelter. Most of the last elements of our stores and personnel baggage entered the shelter through this access. When closed this door was supported by the large hydraulic jacks and other metallic supports due to the considerable weight of potentially over three meters of relatively loose soil placed above it. We also had to consider the effect of the overpressure pulse. This was very worrying for us as it was another unknown quantity so we probably overcompensated and had no problem.
The other main entrance was via a narrow tube about a meter and a quarter in diameter with steps and hand holds down one side. This tube had three heavy doors each separated by about one and a half meters; each door had a central portal of ninety eight centimetre allowing the passage of people and small items. Each access portal had a six centimetre sliding portal to allow examination of what was above. The two upper doors opened downwards with hydraulic damper protection and the third (bottom) opened towards the surface; all were clamped and locked with two rotating metal bars and a slide lock.
It was intended that the upper portal would initially be about the original surface level. It was intended that when closed this access would be covered by soil pulled into the hole by the last person entering the shelter through the six centimetre opening. This idea never really worked but, fortunately, it never needed to.
There were, in total, four exits from the shelter including those above. The first emergency exit was a vertical tube about a meter in diameter with steps and handhold’s up one side. This exit, having access to all floors, was fixed down the outside of the shelter down to the food store level. Access was via a normal wooden door opening to a short corridor through the concrete wall to a small quick release door having a hinge and a two heavy spot welds holding it shut. The tube itself was filled with dried sand within a plastic inner tube (to keep the contents dry) for simple and rapid removal from below. Indeed it was dry sand as this provided further protection. It was designed to present difficulties to anyone trying to enter from above.
This tube went up to about two and a half meters above the level of the shelter roof with swing-down access to the outside via another portal with an oil filled damper system protecting those exiting from material entering the tube too quickly. This was the primary emergency exit. The other emergency exit was via the main air vent where the blockages to prevent the ingress of water and support the ventilation fans would have to be removed before an exit could be achieved. This, we estimated, would take between two and four hours to complete depending on the then existing conditions.
Our external observation security included an electrically powered rotating periscope with infra red and night vision capabilities. This item was provided and installed by our military experts. With this unit we could see any intruders within four hundred meters; if not blocked by very cold dust particles. There were also two simple fixed periscopes hidden inside specially modified chimneys of two modified outbuildings. These two units should be able to see any intruder within two hundred meters as long as they were carrying a light source. A light source would probably be necessary for anyone travelling during the early phase of the catastrophe.
As a final means of intruder detection we had six presence detectors that could be switched on and off from inside the shelter. These detectors were positioned, after the initial danger period had past, on our first post impact exit from the shelter. If these units had been placed prior to this it would have been very likely that even well protected they would have been washed away by the expected deluge. This proved, on our first exit, to be the probable scenario though such was our flow limiting methods effectiveness that some might only have been lost in the mud-flows. Unfortunately, from our point of view, this would probably have resulted in their total loss.
Another problem was the heating of food after the first few days when we planned to heat the food with gas heaters. Cooking could only take place when the showers were not being used allowing the reallocation of the showers six hundred and fifty Watts. Cooking by electricity was inherently safer than gas but could only be performed when a main generator was operating. The food heaters themselves were controlled by thermostats to ensure that excessive temperatures would not be reached. Such temperature would have been both hazardous and inefficient in energy usage.
The insulated units were said to be ninety five percent + efficient. This was apparently achieved in practice. We used these insulated containers as ordinary pots and pans would have been too energy inefficient for our long term use. The material we cooked inside these containers could be manually stirred via an external handle we installed through their insulated lids. For protection, though probably unnecessary, the internal pressure of the vessels was controlled by a release valve, similar to pressure cookers, that was designed by us. The sixty five litres capacity of each of the larger containers was sufficient to supply all the initial inmates with a reasonable warm meal on a daily basis necessitating about two and a half hours of heating. Within about two months we were consistently providing two warm meals per person per day which further raised our morale.
When removing the insulated containers from the university we had also removed, stolen, much specialized electronic equipment including four radio signal detectors and direction finders (we intended to use these later to find new personnel) and some old cathode ray tubes that had been used for electron deflection demonstrations that we hoped to be able to modify for other uses.
For hot coffee and tea we modified several large thermos flasks. Each had a fifty Watt heater element which proved sufficient to provide all that wanted it with a moderately large hot drink twice a day. A small hole was put into the lid to pass the heater wires and to release any overpressure. This modification resulted in a simple, reasonably efficient and effective unit produced with little effort that proved beneficial when it was uncomfortably cold in parts of the shelter. We were, at this time, reasonably comfortable and felt that everything possible had been done to provide security and some moderate comfort for us all.
I considered, at that time, that our life in this shelter we had so carefully designed and built, though restricted, would be acceptable to us all and provide as much survival potential as anything we could have built in the time. In addition the personnel we had chosen should provide us with a reasonable future that would be, at least, intellectually stimulating.
Chapter 4. Gover
nment Facilities and Failures.
Slightly over a month before the asteroid arrival the government announced their survival plan to the people. The people were advised that a place in a government shelter was an offer to all who would accept it.
Those wishing to take up the government offer were requested to take any excess energy and food resources they then had to a central pick up point defined for their area. There they were to advise a resident government representative of their intentions. They would, based on the information they provided, be told that on a date (they would be advised later), shortly before the impact date, they should take any then remaining food, clothing and available sustainable energy sources; manually chargeable torches etc. to a pick up point close to their homes. From there they would be taken, by bus, to their allocated government shelter. In the shelter they would be allocated a family area. They would be allowed to keep all their personal items but food, fuel and other defined items would be collected, at their shelter, as communal assets. Those not wishing to take up the offer could keep what they had.
We considered that in the proposed government shelters, unless those shelters were on high ground, properly modified with sufficient sustainable food, water access and power, sealed yet somehow ventilated the retreats would be death-traps. From information we had received the regional shelters would normally be underground car-parks and such like places of apparent refuge. Without sufficient survival facilities, to provide for the long term maintenance of the shelter inmates, even well designed and constructed shelters would remain unsustainable life supporting areas. When dealing with such numbers the possibility that the government could even feed the multitude in the long term, without years of preparation, was unrealistic.
The government advised, right to the end, that whilst every effort would be made to provide food and shelter within those edifices the people should take with them whatever they could to their pick up point. These items should include any remaining food, clothing and personnel requirements that their inmates could carry. Those intending to use these shelters should have read this as a warning.
It was demoralizing for us to realize that, with the numbers involved, the government offer was unsupportable. They would be unable to help their constituents whilst their numbers remained so great hence they would not do so. Because of this government failure our only option was to maintain a properly supported survival base and later, a period we were obviously then unable to define, recover and support any remnants of the population that had survived to that time. As previously stated we would by then be in need of personnel.
Any survivors would tend to be those tough, resilient and intelligent enough to live in a protected environment. Some of their survival actions, unfortunately, might make them unacceptable to our new society but how could we tell the difference? We would just have to hope that any unacceptable traits, within our recovered survivors, could be converted sufficiently to live within our constraints; otherwise?
From what we were advised by the builder who had visited examples of government edifices the entrances were closed and to some extent protected against the expected blast. In his opinion, however, what was offered was far below the standard necessary to even protect the inmates. They could not be considered sufficient to provide even secure accommodation for such large numbers for such long periods.
Toilet arrangements were observed but overall the results were tragically inadequate. One problem was that the toilets were often connected without valves, or if such valves existed they were unsuitable, to the main drainage system. For this reason back-pressure from the blast would probably cause flooding within the edifice. Such flooding would probably make the edifice rapidly uninhabitable and any survivors would then have to evacuate into a lethal environment. In addition, from our experience of storing material, the shelters would be unable to store sufficient food for the inhabitants for more than a few weeks. Initial survival, if even that was achieved, would merely extend the suffering of the inmates.
Though we did not look at the arrangements in the major cities, where the subways would probably be used to provide some facilities, we could visualize the problems from our experience of setting up our shelter. Unfortunately those government shelters would probably be below ground within unsealed tunnels. Unless those tunnels were sufficiently modified and baffled against the pressure wave they would be another, quite literally, dead end for their inmates.
I was very glad that we would not have to observe the distress of those unfortunate city inhabitants during the crises. Their chances would have been even less than those in the small towns and villages of our shelter area. In these villages we hoped to join up with survivors some time after the event. Many of the villages were agricultural and their collective will and facilities might well be sufficient to provide resources and shelter for the survival of some members.
It was our unanimous opinion that very few of the government supported individuals and families would survive in their shelters without arrangements such as we had been able to make. Being underground, unless they were on relatively high ground, which is not usual for car parks or metro systems, the possibility of shelter inundation by one means or another was only one of the many expected deadly problems. The only benefit to the future, provided by those government offers, was that those people accepting the government offer would tend to stay within the cities and not mass evacuate into the countryside. The evacuation of such numbers into the country would make things, temporarily, even worse. However, even such mass evacuations would not change, in any significant way, the final result.
The knowledge of what would happen to those communities had a distinct effect on our moral but there was nothing we could do during the initial stages of the disaster. We would be like a Titanic lifeboat waiting for the number of survivors to reduce sufficiently for us to assist them without endangering ourselves. It was our intention to look for survivors as soon as we considered it an acceptable risk after the impact. This period remained undefined though we considered it as probably being several months.
In reality our plans were based on the principle that we would wait until the local survivor numbers could be either fitted into our lifeboat where they could then be provided with the basic requirements of life from our limited stores or alternatively they could be provided, by us, with technical, medical and other forms of sustenance to survive within their own environment. Our estimate of the total number we could sustain within the shelter was about two hundred and fifty. When we had recovered this number of survivors we expected that they would be able to continue within our collective group until we could all exit into the new world. We would then, however, have to produce our own food in sufficient quantities for the sustainability of our then, hopefully, increased populace. The number of persons required to provide such quantities of food and the techniques to be used for its cultivation were of major concern though we hoped to be able to reduce our permanent agricultural workers to between twenty to twenty five percent of our working population within a couple of years.
The question as to why we did not initially take two hundred and fifty persons into our shelter comes down largely to security. Even within the approximately one hundred soles, of our “original group”, shelter security was considered a potential problem. However, in most cases, those persons were either known to us or were from well outside the area and could therefore be controlled by being provided with accommodation within the environment of our shelter. In addition, until near the event, we were unsure of the facilities we would be able to accumulate. We had even resorted to the gleaning of fields, after harvest, with some limited success.
Chapter 4. Plans, Preparation & Evacuation.
A major problem that we had had to consider, and had planned for very carefully, was the task of evacuating, to our shelter, all our invitees. This task was not trivial as it had to be accomplished without anyone, not within our invited group, being aware of what was going on. We also had to e
nsure that our guests did not provide usable information to their friends or associates. This possibility was what I feared most. It was one of our major evacuation problems as blood, in this case association, is often thicker than water.
A problem was that nervous people tend to fortify themselves with alcohol and in such condition they might talk rather too freely. Regarding such possibilities we had no choice but to rely on the strength of character of our chosen personnel. We had, however, previously decided to limit the knowledge available to most of our invitees as to where, when, and how they would gain access to the shelter until their evacuation time. This knowledge was maintained, for all our security, within a small circle of individuals who required such information. This was, in itself, a problem as our ignorant guests were then required to trust us implicitly with the lives of themselves and their families until near the time of the impact. The only thing in our favour was that our guests believed we were their only realistic survival option and that we required their technical expertise for our future.
Because of concerns expressed to us about three months prior to the impact we allowed our then ignorant invitees to choose a representative to visit the shelter. The representative they chose was one of our military guests, Fabio. On the journey to our shelter he was prevented from observing the route by the application of a blindfold. The path we took him on was rather circular and necessitated him passing, both going and returning, two of the four hour journey in this condition. I believe, though he never stated the fact, that in spite of our precautions he might have been able to find the shelter, had he so wished, possibly by noting the local landscape while entering the shelter.
On his arrival he was taken to the shelter and shown the current state of stores and what was being created. On his return, with the result of his unscripted presentation, most of our guests concerns were removed and I believed that, for this reason, the visit had been a very useful exercise.
Our asteroid survival: A fictitional history of the ten year survival of a large ELE asteroid impact by a small, pre advised, group Page 10