In the aftermath of the Times Square car bomb scare, many people are wondering if any preventative measures, such as the "Ring of Steel," could have (or should have) caught the SUV bomb. But others, such as children's-health advocate Irwin Redlener, want to add a different element to the conversation: preparedness.
In this week's Talk of the Town, Redlener explains that people need to discuss the reality of a terrorist attack happening in NYC: “There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario. But we’re still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile...There’s a fatalism that clouds the planning process. It’s frustrating. It’s been shown that your odds of survival can be significantly improved with a relatively small amount of planning. I could put it all on a card.”
The founder and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, Redlener gives a couple tips for surviving a terrorist attack, specifically, if a bomb is dropped on Manhattan: avoid looking at the blast ("a tremendous flash of light" that "could blind you"), get to the core of the building you're in (the center of the building, away from windows), then make your way below ground to a basement-type area to avoid fallout. From there, you should monitor the radio (it is implied you should have an emergency kit nearby with a battery-operated radio in it) to try to plot an evacuation route (and make sure you "dont go to Long Island").
