Just curious but are you misspelling Easter Lily or do you mean Ester Lily? Ester is interesting. The spirit of Ester.
You are well prepared indeed. How about this. Where I am we have a subway which I depend on everyday. Do you know there are some people who would not dream of getting on the train without a gas mask and a flashlight. I've never seen any other rider with these but most people both men and women carry some sort of bag. I've thought of those things. Perhaps you want a gas mask in every room, I am serious. I don't understand what a gas mask does. I mean it may cover your eyes and face but you are still breathing the air, right? Did you see Prime Time the other night about the train wreck in North or South Dakota that released a poison and killed around 9 people as though it were Raid sprayed on bugs. A girl who was a mile away still suffers from terrible lung damage and trees in her yard never recovered. They claim that freight trains carry serious toxic stuff. There are tracks near me. They showed home video from another wreck up north. The person came upon many dead deer in the area.
If we are ever attacked as a nation with chemical weapons, I think we are in trouble no matter how prepared we are with "home safety" kits..
I remember the incident w/train you mentioned. I never followed up to hear of the injuries afterward
Actually, the name is "Ester," but it's related to Easter in this case. I bought this snake right around Easter this year, and was having a horrible time finding a name for her. I'm not very good at coming up with names. I had named my first female snake "Katrina" because the hurricane had a big impact in this area last year and my first pet python would have an impact on me. ("Elvis" stayed "Elvis" because the store owner told me that the previous owner named him that.) A friend's mom suggested "Ester" because it was close to Easter when I bought her. I looked up the name, and "Ester" seems to come from a Scandinavian word for star and a Middle-Eastern word that is associated with queen. Obviously, there is the connection to Queen Ester in the Old Testament.
The "Lily" part of the name comes from day lilies. She passed a little bowel movement a day or two after I brought her home, so I took her to the vet's office for a general check-up, to be sexed, and to have a culture run on the sample. When I returned home, I had my first day lily bloom of the season, so I stuck "Lily" onto her name.
I admit that the combination is a little confusing because it's so close to Easter Lily. I've even thought about trying to grow an Easter Lily in the yard and occasionally take pictures of them together.
Bill
You are right that someone on a respirator is still breathing the air, but a good respirator will remove certain contaminants. The secret is to have the right respirator for the contaminant that you are facing. I'm not remembering all of the filters available right now. I know that there is an ammonia/amine filter. This filter will catch any ammonia or amine compounds that are in the air. As one draws air through the filter, the ammonia is caught, and clean air reaches one's mouth and nose for breathing. Other filters only catch objects but cannot catch vapors. However, one of these filters should be good against anthrax spores. The spores would be caught in the filter, and the person wearing the mask would be breathing pure air.
The problem with so many of these situations is that you might still need to go through a decontamination before removing the mask. It doesn't do any good to wear a mask that will filter anthrax spores for a while if you end up taking off the mask while the spores are still on your skin, hair, clothing, and the mask. You could be perfectly safe until you get out of the subway and take off the mask. However, the spores would be in your hair and on your clothing. Taking off the mask might disturb the spores in your hair enough to get them airborne again. Then you'd breathe them into your lungs and be facing the same problem.
To be safe, you'd have to be able to get to a shower before you took off your mask. The shower would have to be located where everything that you touched or passed on the way to the shower could be rinsed down to keep those spores from getting back to you. If you came out of the subway, turned on a fire water hydrant, drenched yourself for five or ten mintues until every part of your body was thoroughly rinsed, and then removed all of your clothes before removing the mask, you'd likely be safe. If you had spare clothes sealed in an airtight bag that you had rinsed completely as well, you could open the bag after complete decontamination, change into the spare clothes, and go about your business.
In other cases, you are right that a gas mask would have no effect even in the subway. For instance, if the terrorist attack produced a fire that burned intensely enough to use all of the oxygen in an enclosed area, a gas mask would be worthless. As the oxygen content of the air went from the usual more or less twenty percent to ten or fifteen percent, people wouldn't have enough oxygen in the air they were breathing to sustain body functions. In that case, they'd asphyxiate regardless of anything they did to filter the air.
I understand someone wanting even a good filter mask in that situation. The filter mask won't help if the oxygen content gets too low. I don't think any of the filters will catch carbon monoxide, but I don't remember all of the filters. However, the filter would catch the smoke particles that otherwise would irritate someone's lungs. Trying to get out of a smoky subway would be easier if one's lungs weren't irritated by the smoke.
Bill