Our government now recommends creating a "safe room" in your house to protect against chemical, biological and radiological attack. This room is apparently to be created using plastic sheeting and "the Handyman's Secret Weapon" (to quote Red Green), duct tape. A couple of people have asked me, being the resident science guy at work, if this is a good idea. Of course it's a good idea. Working with duct tape is ALWAYS a good idea.
Seriously, the answer is yes and no. Yes, it will provide you with a moderate level of protection against some (but not all) types of chemical attacks. This is, as one of my coworkers pointed out, providing that you're bright enough to also close off the heating/air conditioning ducts into your safe room. If the Grand Union of Freaking Nut-Jobs Everywhere (GUFNJE) mustard gases your hometown, such measures will actually protect you pretty well. Even if they use a nerve agent like sarin, you're much more likely to survive the attack inside your safe room than outside.
It's a simple concentration game, really. There is no way you're going to really make your room airtight. Nor would you really want to do so, unless you have a handy supply of compressed oxygen or a really big room, because you and your family and your cats are going to use up the free oxygen in your living room quite rapidly. Worse, every exhalation releases carbon dioxide. This is not a good thing to breathe in at high levels. Basically in an airtight room, you'll die well before those three days are gone.
If you're in a slowly leaking envelope, you have the advantage of keeping the concentration of chemical or biological or radiological agent relatively low when compared to the outside. The "safe room" limits your exposure. It doesn't prevent exposure. With most chemical or radiological agents, this is enough.
On the other hand, it isn't nearly enough protection from biological agents. Why? Simple. It takes hundreds of billions of molecules of mustard gas to kill you, but it only takes a single anthrax spore. The spore will germinate, and then it will multiply exponentially. You buy yourself time, theoretically, but not any real safety. Worse yet, if GUFNJE dusts your town with weaponized anthrax spores, you won't be able to leave your shelter anyhow without being exposed to the agent. Everyone will eventually (sooner rather than later, hopefully) have to have massive doses of Cipro or the high-test antibiotic of the month.
The more horrible reality, of course, is that you won't even know when you're exposed to anthrax spores or any other biological agent. The concentration of weaponized spores necessary to cause mass infections is too low to see as a "white dust" or powder. GUFNJE will simply dust the town at night from a rented civilian aircraft, and no one will know the difference until people actually start getting sick. At that point, it's too late with anthrax. The bacteria are busy dumping toxins into your body which will kill you, even if antibiotics kill the bacteria. Of course, scientists are frantically working on an antitoxin...
So YES. If it's a chemical or radiological attack, you're in good shape if you have your safe room; provided that your local government or someone has a plan for getting everyone out eventually. And NO, if bioweapons are used, you may as well say screw the safe room and track-ass right down to your local hospital. You really want to be one of the first to get treatment, by the way, because under a mass bioweapon attack, our medical infrastructure will collapse in short order.
I'm not going to do it. The cats would just shred the damn thing anyhow. I refuse to let a bunch of people who don't even study math (the Madrasa - "educated" terrorists, not the Iraqis) frighten me into radically changing my life. If I die, so be it.
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