The protection of your home against air raids / Home Office.

Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The protection of your home against air raids / Home Office. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    them right up or you won’t be able to carry them. If you cannot get sand, use earth instead. It will serve as well. If you haven’t got sandbags, a wall of boxes filled with earth will do instead. The box wall should not be less than 2 ft. 6 ins. thick. If the boxes are large, fill them in position. The boxes should be quite full and the earth well pressed down. If your refuge-room is in a basement, and the window opens on to an area which you cannot fill in or cover over, build a wall of sandbags or boxes of earth round the top of the cellar area. See illustration on page 30. Save any small sacks or cloth bags or stout paper sacks you may get from time to time, even a few will be useful. Collect now wooden boxes or large cardboard cartons that will hold earth. EXTRA PRECAUTIONS AGAINST GAS You have been told how to seal your refuge-room against gas. Try also to keep gas out of the rest of the house by blocking up ventilators and cracks, as recommended for the refuge-room, and by protecting as many windows as possible against being broken by blast, as described on page 16. Then if you shut all windows and doors before a raid, there will be much less risk of gas penetrating into the house while you are in the refuge- room. An additional precaution in flats or large buildings would be an air-lock at the door of a communal reftge2-room, or at a main outer door, or in a corridor which had to be used frequently. An air-lock is simply two gas-proof doors or curtains 4 feet or more apart, with a space between them sealed like a refuge- room. Persons can then pass through without admitting gas, provided they close the first door or curtain when they are inside the air-lock before opening the second.