A couple weeks back–during the last homeland security scare-- the govt. recommended covering a room in your home with duct tape and plastic sheeting as protection against gas/germ attacks. Obviously, to be truly effective, the room would have to be air-tight, so eventually you’d suffocate!
I’m wondering if you could take houseplants into the room to convert exhaled CO2 back into breathable air? If so, which plants would be best (i.e. quickest at converting the most CO2) and how many are needed per “average” person?
It doesn’t really answer all your questions, but I believe the omission about including oxygen-producing plants exists because the chemicals that might be used in such an attack aren’t going to remain in the air in sufficient concentrations to cause widespread damage to people exiting their “safe-rooms” many hours after the attack. You won’t run out of air in a good-sized room for quite some time (I’m not sure exactly how long, but I’d wager you could stay in the room for at least 24 hours, probably longer without running out of air).
If there are germs used in such an attack, or persistent chemicals that settle out of the air onto surfaces such as plants, sidewalks, fences, cars, doorknobs, etc. and can still harm people upon contact, I would imagine that evacuation is a much better response than waiting in a “safe-room”, but emergency response officials would probably still want everyone to stay in a “safe-room” until they figured out what kind of attack was taking place and how best to evacuate everyone.
You’d have to leave the room eventually anyway and would expose yourself to a certain amount of danger when you did, but better to leave the room when the majority of the chemcial or biological agent has had time to settle out of the air.
I hope someone else could help with the plants, but I think it would be near-impossible to figure out what kind and how many you would need without a lot of information about the number of people; their sizes, breathing rates, etc.
If you’re really worried about it, you could stock your “safe-room” with a scuba tank of compressed air and a regulator. Personally, I’m skeptical that it would help that much.
The CO[sub]2[/sub] collects on the floor, so as long as you are standing up you’ll be okay. It’s when you start to get tired and feel like laying down for a little nap that you run into trouble.
Infants are the first to go … then small children … people in wheelchairs … and eventually everyone else.