If a meteor strike occurs that leads to something akin to nuclear winter (but not bad enough that it cooks all life on earth like the meteor 65 million years ago did) what would be the expected protocol to maintain order and save lives?
I would assume organizing people into secure groups that can communicate via radio, working on hydroponic crops (if agriculture doesn’t work due to the debris in the air) and collecting supplies, and trying to maintain security against panic. People would still die though but you’d assume if they had food (either from growing crops or if that fails, living off of prepackaged food until hydroponics via artificial light can be enacted large scale), civilization would continue.
Is there anything else that would be considered high importance that would need to be done?
I think the right response would be to rapidly send a similar-sized meteor toward whoever dropped that one on us. (Think of Djokovic returning a hard Federer serve, writ large.)
My serious response would be that this situation doesn’t appear to call for a military response, unless/until its determined that it was a hostile action. Even then, our military technology might not be up to the task.
To be sure, the military might usefully be involved in various civil defense activities.
It depends. If the resources available to state governors (National Guard, state defense forces) can’t preserve order, there are laws on the books which authorize various military forces to support civilian agencies in case of national emergency. The president has certain additional authority under the Insurrection Act, but things have to get pretty bad before he can use that. The Posse Comitatus Act does not apply to the Coast Guard, though, so there’s that. And there’s some post-Reconstruction legislation that yields some odd latitude in the event of loss of constitutional rights.
Beyond all that, they can do whatever Congress says they can, so if a quorum survives in each house, everything could change very fast. None of the things you mention would be high on anyone’s list, though. They’d be keeping the streets safe, and maybe distributing aid. Organizing civilians and growing food are state and local functions, and if they couldn’t do it, emergency powers would more likely be given to civilian agencies, with troops providing security and other support.
Also, I can only imagine FEMA would divert some of its resources from its Concentration Camps (the NWO COINTELPRO M.O.U.S.E. Division) to help the survivors.
There is no plan by the United States (either by DHS/FEMA or the DoD) for a coordinated emergency response to a large scale meteor strike, nor is any agency of the United States have a dedicated office to tracking or planning for a meteorite strike. NASA has proposed plans for a Planetary Defense Coordination Office that would coordinate surveillance and mitigation efforts, but a lack of funding has forestalled any effort to actually perform any useful activity. Because this is a “black swan” type of event, it is considered of low value by policymakers, even if the consequences could be catastrophic both financially and in terms of loss of life. The reality is that we have technology that could be readily developed to detect and deflect the majority of threats that could be easily fielded in a ten or fifteen year timeframe, but there is no perceived impetus to do so, nor is it likely to come about until it is too late.
As for military respose, that would depend on the location of the strike and resulting impact upon US population. It is likely than any direct strike near or affecting a metropolitan area the continental United States by a bolide >50m in diameter would overwhelm any emergency response that the federal government could field. This kind of event could be an order of magnitude or more worse than the flooding or New Orleans or Gulf Oil Spill, and yet no foresight or willpower exists to deal with it in an effective manner.
You may find this funny but it really isn’t. I almost got struck twice. The last time this happened I was in Peru in 2007. Fivehundred people living near suffered radiation sickness and the ground got highly contaminated. If you ever experience impact don’t wait for your military, just get your ass out of there. :rolleyes:
Are you referring to Carancas? If so, there was no radiation involved; the illnesses were from arsenic in the (boiling) groundwater. The meteor imagined in the OP would have an impact that’s a bit more worldwide, I think.
It was indeed that one impact in Puno that made many people ill here. Contrary to what Wikipedia may say it is my believe that people got ill from something other than arsenic in heated gound water.
