RE: Dirty Bomb - CNN Accuracy?

As a health physicist, interested in emergency response, I would like like to chime in and support John's comments with a few notes of my own. John, and the others who have indicated support for the public going home, changing clothes, and showering are addressing the right answer for significant dispersal events. A fairly simple dispersal device can contaminate several square miles of area easily resulting in contamination to thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals. I know of no community that has the resources required to respond to this to conduct monitoring and decon operations for every one.

In the past I have heard discussions about "corraling" all the contaminated personnel in a stadium or other large facility until such assistance is available. The results would be dramatically increased exposures for the personnel and presumably very long wait times waiting for the military or other federal resources to arrive on scene. The flip side is yes individuals cars will be contaminated as will their homes and other objects they come in contact with. However, here (emergencies) is where we must make a distinction between "nusiance" contamination and the real issues of public health and safety. The last thing we want is for the response organizations being tied up with minor contamination concerns when lives may be at risk in other areas. The answer, like so many, is dependent on the specific scenario and yes there should be some effort as a follow up to assess potential exposures.

And on that point I would like to put forward a scenario where real life and death issues may be faced in a dispersal event. While I do agree the most probable dispersal event will likely result in minimal health impacts outside of those actually caused by the "explosion" there is a significant possibilty that the rad concerns will create real life and death issues for the responders. For a simple illustration just add a few thousand curies of Cs-137 to the Oklahoma City Incident. In such a case you must be concerned with conducting search and rescue operations in a contaminated environment. The use of personal protective equipment by responders will slow productivity to the point that operations that might otherwise take a day may take a week. Of course this is not conducive to the survival of anyone trapped and injured in the building. The other issue is the rad exposure being recieved by the victims. In such an event the local exposure rates could be expected to be in the multi R/hr range if not the tens or even hundreds of R/hr range. Such exposure rates represent real dangers to the trapped victims and potentially represent a health risk to the responders as well. Personally I do not think this scenario as far fetched as some would like to believe.