I spent an hour or 2 recently Googling for any signs that BART's ventilation system has been designed to keep operating if the electrical grid goes down and I didn't find anything. I think that the subway systems of Moscow and St Petersburg have ventilation systems designed to keep operating after a nuclear attack (because the Russian government takes nuclear war more seriously than governments in the US do) although I welcome more information on that point: I'm particularly interested in details such as whether the air intakes for those 2 subway systems point down (which is the easiest way to prevent fallout from falling into the air intakes and thereby landing close enough to sheltering people to cause their deaths). Either danger seems likely to kill most of the people in the tunnels before it becomes safe enough to leave the tunnels (2 or 3 weeks). Of the 2 dangers, I'm more afraid of the heat (though if the tunnel were in Fairbanks, AK, I'd be more afraid of CO2): the ground is a very poor conductor of heat. In normal times, the tunnels are "actively ventilated", meaning fans are used to bring air in from the outside, but an attack by Russia or China would surely prevent electricity from getting to the fans (because destroying the US's generating and electrical-distribution capacity would be one of the goals of the attack) so CO2 and heat would build up in the tunnels if there are people in the tunnels. ![]() In an attack by Russia or China (or Russia and China), it's not - unless the people in the tunnels are low in number and have some way to prevent additional people from entering. In an attack with a single nuke, the BART tunnels seem like a pretty good place to go.
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