A Place to Feel Safe Experts Advise Prudence, Not Panic

By Annie Groer Washington Post Staff Writer

Before Sept. 11, Neil Livingstone advised perhaps a dozen clients a year how to create a residential “safe room” in case of “home invasion” by armed robbers or kidnappers.

Now, as fears of mail-borne anthrax rattle a public already shocked by terror attacks five weeks ago, he receives daily inquiries about home protection. “Everyone wants to know what to do,” said Livingstone, chairman and CEO of GlobalOptions, an international risk-management firm in downtown Washington.

“Everyone” includes his wife, Susan Livingstone, undersecretary of the Navy, who managed to escape through billowing smoke and searing heat from a Pentagon conference that fateful Tuesday. After the U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan and widening bioterrorism scares last week, she asked her husband how to make their Watergate apartment safer for themselves and their toy poodle, Bomber.

Options are multiple, dictated by levels of alarm and income: Spend $25,000 to $50,000 or more (potentially much more) on a steel and reinforced-concrete mini-bunker, complete with high-tech communication and ventilation systems, backup generator, gas masks, “moon suits,” beds and enough food and drugs to last for months. Or spend about $100 on plastic sheeting, duct tape, bottled water, a portable radio and first aid kit to secure an existing room for a few hours.

Livingstone advised his wife to take a low-cost, low-tech approach: reasonable preparedness without undue paranoia. “I told her how to turn one bathroom into a safe room. We don’t have windows there, but even if you have them, you can do it. You need a lot of masking or duct tape. You turn off all the heating and air-conditioning systems, put the tape over any ventilation ducts, all around the windows and door and cover any drains.”

This is not the first time America has been on high alert. The Cold War and Cuban missile crisis sent many scrambling for materials to build and stock home bomb shelters in the event of nuclear war. Using mail-order plans, prefab kits or custom builders, they created shelters of various sizes and states of elaborateness. And a generation of students learned to scamper under desks during “duck and cover” air raid drills.

Today’s renewed sense of alarm has been a fact of life for decades in many strife-torn nations. In Israel the government provides gas masks to citizens.

“Every house, every apartment building must have a safety room, like a small bomb shelter made of steel, with a special door, also steel, very heavy,” said Michal Mazoz of the Israeli Embassy here.

“During the Gulf War, they told us to put up plastic to seal the windows so air cannot come through, and also on the door,” Mazoz said. For added protection, Israelis were advised to wedge towels dampened in water and baking soda between door and floor “to help prevent gas from coming inside. And, of course, we have the masks. Some people bought a plastic suit and wore it when the alarms went off. My mother wanted to buy some, but my father said it was ridiculous.”

There is no law requiring Americans to have a safe room, and most have no clue what they are.

“A true safe room that you see a lot of in Hollywood—a lot of movie stars, moguls, have it in their home—are reinforced against things to the point you can’t shoot through it,” says Chuck Vance, who heads a security consulting firm, Vance International in Oakton, Va. Inside such a steel and concrete chamber, “you’d have a shotgun, a communications system, a second phone line, a radio, water.”

Vance (President Gerald Ford’s Secret Service agent and former son-in-law) tells clients there are basically three levels of home protection: “a regular holding room, your safe room and then you’ve got almost a bomb shelter. They are asking, ‘What do I need, what level of concern?‘ We are recommending the lower end of the thing.”

Lower end, he says, means “just a room in the house to get you out of harm’s way, someplace with no windows, no glass, probably just one door you can tape up, if necessary; a good medical kit, lots of water, hopefully a two-way, battery-powered radio and another communications system like a CB radio. You want to try to make it as air-proof as you can, which means you can’t stay in there too long. You will run out of oxygen.”

The basic safe room is usually built in a master bedroom closet or bathroom for easy family access, he says. The most elaborate and expensive ones are virtual bomb shelters “with a separate ventilation system, beds where you can hunker down” until the air is clear.

By calm contrast, Vance’s family has “just a room downstairs, with some water. There is no glass. It’s the standard stuff you’d tell people about a hurricane or tornado.”

Finding a personal preparedness comfort zone is an individual matter, says Amy Smithson, principal author of “Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the U.S. Response.”

For one thing, how long people need to stay put depends on the particular chemical or biological agent, the delivery method and the weather, if the substance is spread outdoors.

“Some chemical agents, like phosgene and hydrogene cyanide, will dissipate within a few minutes if it is sunny and breezy, or windy and rainy,” says Smithson, citing “The International Handbook on Chemical Weapons Proliferation” by Gordon M. Burck and Charles C. Flowerree. “Such bio-warfare agents as anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, smallpox and plague are really hard to pin down. The longer they are out in the air, the less time they will be alive. Other agents, like mustard gas, sarin, tabun, soman and VX, can last outdoors from 15 minutes to three weeks under the same weather conditions.”

Moreover, she says, “water can be a very effective decontaminant for chemical agents. If you are outside and birds start dropping from the sky, that’s a clear indicator there is a toxic chemical present. Get indoors as quickly as possible, shut doors and windows, turn off the air conditioner and strip. Taking off outer clothing will remove 80 percent of contaminants. Washing any exposed skin will further help.”

In her own Virginia condo, says Smithson, “I am not sealing myself up. I have such a small place. But for the average family, are they willing to stay in that room 24/7? Because a covert biological attack—and the odds are really, really long—will not come with an announcement...Families could be sleeping in a single room for years on end.”

Worry about biotoxins and chemicals has prompted a handful of wealthy locals to call contractor George Fritz, co-owner of Horizon Builders in Crofton. They have been inquiring about safe rooms with a separate ventilation system and an independent power source to run it should the electricity fail.

“The theory is that the fan pumps contaminated air—whether it be nuclear type fallout, germicidal or tear gas—through a series of filters to remove those particles that are offensive, then it pumps the air into the room and pressurizes the room from the inside so nothing can get in to you,” says Fritz.

He says no one has yet hired him to build what amounts to a latter-day bomb shelter.

Herndon dental hygienist Steacey Kardes, 48, knows all about those Cold War relics. “I grew up with one in Alexandria, and so did a lot of our Marlan Forest neighbors,” she says. “It was about 20-by-20 feet and had a hand-cranked air-purification system, lots of canned food, a portable radio. My father put a seal around the door. We did emergency drills, and he made a work schedule for things like who would crank the purifier, who would keep track of supplies, even when each of us would use the exercise bike so we wouldn’t get bored.”

Kardes, a fatalist, does not want a new one: “Chemical warfare technology has advanced so far that when the big one hits, why prolong the inevitable annihilation by two or three more hours?”

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001

Answers

"towels dampened in water and baking soda" Never read that about baking soda before, but it makes sense.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001

It occurs to me--for speed--the vegetable wash called "Fit" (I think) is a baking soda/water solution. Couple of bottles of that wouldn't be a bad idea. (Ever tried to dissolve baking soda in water? Then you know what I mean!)

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001