I wouldn't mess with IronRaven if I were you Buckshot. Playing with fire there. Although the majority of people here love to play with fire, maybe I should have phrased that differently.

1. Left click on blue-colored username at top left of a post.
2. Scroll down to "View Profile" and click.
3. Once profile pops up click on "Ignore this user"
4. Smile and whistle a happy tune.

-Blast

So........ share some of your superior knowledge then if you will bro, In the meantime relax, you may live longer. This isn't the place to be a s#$%h&#D.

[quote=unimogbert]
What can you do???? Seems obvious to me- DON'T BE THERE! Working in NYC (or any other large city for that matter) is, in my opinion, a choice against one's own survival for many reasons.
[/quote=unimogbert]

BullS*^^. Utter, total Bull%&*%^.

I live in a rural part of PA, and work in Manhattan. I'm a Lieutenant officer in the local Fire Company, and I've been in NYC during a recent emergency - when the big steam line exploded over my Grand Central terminal.

The response was instant - I mean it - instant. There was no dispatch delay, there was no waiting on responding workers.

The number and quality of emergency services in NYC surpasses ANYTHING you can imagine. The speed, competence and totality of the response, the preplaning, the sheer experience of the Urban emergency services leaves us rural folks so far behind it's not even comparable.

I've also seen the NYC response to big emergencies, starting with 9/11.

When FEMA called NYC to help on 9/11 - NYC said, "No, we can handle it". And they did.

When the lights went out for a few days in 2003, it was a bit of a party, No rioting, no looting.

I've seen stuff happening in NYC that would utterly cripple my local response capabilities - in every respect - and these events didn't even warrant any news coverage.

Before you automatically assume that cities are seething swamps ready to explode into violence at a moment's notice, I suggest that you consider that, with the exception of a few short-term localized events (Katrina, Watts, Washington Heights), our cities have always endured a crisis, and Americans have long banded together in a crisis.

Let's look to the California Wildfires as an example of how most people react in a "we're all in this together" situation.

BTW welcome to the forum.

Blitz

Well, what are we trying to say?

Me, I'm saying I live in the country, the closest city to me has less than two hundred thousand people in it- not a "real" city (sorry Matt). I'm not immediately downwind of anything worth wasting a nuke on any more. I'm not part of a response organization, I won't be going into significant fall out. So I'm not personally worried about the effects of a nuclear detonation other than the social ones, and that is pretty much the same as a large natural disaster combined with some extra paranoia. Isolate and decontaminate people bugging out, wait to see who gets sick- same as with plague or bird flu.

If there is a large scale exchange, that is different, but I honestly do not believe that any state (national, corporate or other) will lob that many nukes at the United States. Talk about it, sure, but I don't think is any more likely to happen than under whatshisname just before Gorby, it just isn't good for business to have us retaliate. That type of stupidity is largely confined to the Middle East, and India-Pakistan; real nuclear-nuts can't get a device to CONUS unless they ship it as freight.

Simply saying there is an X% probability of something happening, without mentioning the timeframe, sounds really cool in front of a television camera. But there isn't really anything there. There is a 100% probability that unless humanity figures out how to actually destroy the planet or we get run over by a baby black hole, the sun's death will reduce North America to a parking lot and blast the air and water away. But the time scale is too large to contemplate. There is a 100% probability that we will be hit with a very large comet or meteor that will radically alter the biosphere between now and then- probably several times. But again, the scale is too large to worry about. I'll go better than 30%, I'll say there is probably a 90%+ chance NYC or LA or some other major city will eventually have a nuke detonated in it. Maybe not in my life time, or our grandkids', it might happen after nukes are so obsolete that the most technical parts of the plans are in high school text books and some torqued off emo-kid builds one becuase he's annoyed that he can't buy matches to make a pipe bomb. *shrugs* Is there a real threat, sure, but the odds of the fault under the Hudson slipping are just as great and would do just as much damage as a small nuke would to NYC. But if I lived there, I wouldn't worry so much about it, just like if I was in California, I wouldn't worry about hurricanes too much.

So what are you trying to say? I'd invite you contribute your wisdom, if you have any. Or do you just have a beef?

martinfocazio - You make a good point. Rescue, relief and emergency services are about saving people. Which often means that the greatest quantity of external resources will be coming to the greatest concentration of people first. Also, because mitigation of damage is a matter of allocation of effort and resources, those places which have money, population and resources are more likely to have appropriate resources on hand.

If the situation is moderately sized, say a small dirty bomb, NYC may not be a bad place to be. They have multiple response teams with specialized training and equipment that smaller towns can't afford. They have top-rated trauma centers and some of the best specialized response units in the world.

If you get slimed in NYC there is a pretty good chance someone who knows how to handle it and the resources to do it right will be there for you. If you get slimed in Lower Podunk it takes a half-hour for the local volunteer FD to assemble. They will have little or no specialized equipment and their knowledge base will consist of a guy sounding out the big words from the wrong page in the manual. (I exaggerate a bit to make the point crystal clear. And to have some fun.) On the positive side if what you fear most is an attack by people bent on hurting the most people in a symbolic setting it is far less likely to happen in Tiny Town.

I like small town and rural life but you have to accept the limitations of the situation. Your more on your own. Response, if there is any, is going to take time getting there. Partly because it takes longer to organize and because it may be heading to the population centers. And, assuming they roll your way, if you want them to use any specialized knowledge or equipment you better bring it with you.

In example: In one rural county the fire department was using plain water to try to maintain protection on multiple homes during a wildfire. The few houses that got the gel that provided better protection only got it because a homeowner had heard about it and purchased it, and the equipment used to apply it, on his own.

Having done my tour in Manhattan, I must say there is some dichotomy of thought regarding survivability. On the one hand, there is perhaps no other place on earth with a more concentrated and robust population of emergency services personnel who are well equipped, highly trained, and eager to do their job (some more than others, but hey, that's the big apple for ya).

On the other hand, there is perhaps nowhere else on earth I've been (other than Baghdad) that I feel more like I've got a big bullseye painted on my back. Not just from enemies foreign, but also quite a few domestic nutjobs and scumbuckets as well. New York has cleaned up a lot in the last 15 years, but it is stil a place where anything can and will happen. Many were the days that I stood on the 30th floor of our office looking over the Hudson toward Lady Liberty, watching the Blackhawks cruising upriver and wondering from what avenue something wicked would that way come. In some remote recess of my mind, I almost expected to see a great flash and the ripple of an enegy wave move across the terrain below me, scouring everything in it's wake.

Then I'd go eat another slice of that glorious pizza and give thanks for how blessed I am to be able to enjoy such ambrosia.

I was running a boat a number of years ago, when one of my guys got hurt. We were right next to a Brooklyn, and I had him in a NYC Harbor Police station within five minutes. We got him to a hospital within ten or fifteen minutes, and he was treated fairly well. His wife was a nurse in a rural area of Virginia. She wanted him to be sent home for surgery and treatment. It took some talking to change her mind, but I basically asked about the surgeon who was going to do the work near his home and how many hands he operated on a year. It was fewer then the number that the New York guy did in every month and some weeks. I said after he is stablized and healing from the surgery, then you can take him home and get him some rehab. Some things here are second to none, including the pizza. Some other things, you need to accept to live here.

Do any of the pizza places deliver to the West Coast? What do you think the tip would be?

Sue