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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.