The Quarantine Room

A quarantine room. We should all have one. We should all have a mental plan with the tools and supplies ready to make it happen. We should actually on occasion run a drill and make sure we are 100% covered. I had that all worked out in my old place. But yesterday as I was sitting in class and the instructor was talking about pandemic and sealing your family in a safe room, my heart dropped. I failed to look at a room for quarantine or sealing ourselves in. Today I walked around my new place and looked at every room. I ran the mental list of what I would need and does this room make sense. I am thinking the master bedroom because it has the adjoining bathroom but I am not 100% happy with it. The plan in my old home was to be in the dining/ kitchen area. It would have worked and it was ground floor.

If one has to seal themselves into their home, it is not just the doors and windows. It is covering the vents and outlets, making sure everything that can let air in is sealed. Sealing and covering everything was easy in the old place because it was an older home with rooms vs. new open concept homes. Older homes seem to have rooms where it would make the task easier. This new place of mine is an open concept floor plan with a staircase from basement to second floor. I would like to hunker down on a bottom floor because it makes escape easier and defense easier because the staircase is not to my advantage if bad guys decide they are coming up. In order to seal off a ground floor room, I would have to have lots of plastic or plywood that would run from floor to ceiling. I just do not know if it is something that could be easily accomplished.

I am also considering sealing off the whole house but that would be real time consuming. So I am asking all you Survival Monkeys, do you have a plan and the supplies to seal your family inside your home in case of pandemic or chemical/toxic blasts? Will you be sealing off your whole house or just one or two rooms?

 

I'm truly glad you brought this topic back up...I've been putting off assembling and testing the equipment to provide positive pressure to the house. Being a small-ish dwelling, it makes more sense to filter incoming air to the house and use a small motorhome for any potentially infected family members during isolation.
I figure 0.5" WC (water column) should be sufficient...

 

Your going to need a lot of duct tape, Also if the house is bricked you will have breather slots in the bricks

 

I agree...but when we gutted and redid the house, we put vapor barrier throughout - walls and ceiling - in preparation for this

Good catch, though. Otherwise we'd be buying duct tape by the pallet!

 

I guess the design and construction of the 'quarantine room' depends upon what the room will be quarantining and whether the room is quarantining occupants from threats to the room from outside of it, or whether the room is protecting folk outside of the room, from threats quarantined within the room. Much also depends upon the threat itself...N or B or C or some combination of the three.

 

Major problem is the change in society and its attitude toward quarantine. In the 1940's I remember several times of major quarantine and a placard on the fences and the door were all that was needed. It used to happen with Polio, scarlet fever, measles, etc in humans and hog cholera, several chicken diseases, rabies in dogs etc, in animals. In the history of this country small pox was controlled as much by strict quarantine as vaccination and most major diseases had no valid vaccine and were thus limited to quarantine. There are valid arguments as to the destruction of many cultures by new diseases when they came in contact with new cultures, most Hawaiians, most North American natives, a good portion of Europe in the plagues, come to mind, and our modern culture with its rapid mass movements of population and little respect for tradition require that we prepare a physical area for ourselves. In our case, that requires 2 separate cases, one to prevent strangers from infecting us, safe rooms,air infiltration, food supplies, etc, and one to limit contact with arriving family members until we know they are safe, separate building that has heat and where we can feed them without physical contact. The odds of our family turning the kids and grand kids away is so close to 0 that I might as well try to figure something out ahead of time. They are not preppers, think we are a little strange to worry about things, don't know of our preps, but have history of showing up when things don't work out and they are family. I often joke with my wife that if the SHTF, family is going to be our most dangerous enemy and I think it would be twice as bad in an epidemic situation. My wife would not send the grand children away in a crisis, because they "may" be infected and I don't think I could either.

 

Mine has faux brick half way up the side but I think it is just for decoration. I have never heard about breather slots in brick homes. Is this a practice that is with all brick homes? In the Denver Metro area there are whole neighborhoods that are brick homes.

If we are sealed in then those that cold be potentially sick and a threat, those people have to stay in the garage until they are deemed safe and can be let into the house. I know some people put preps inside their garage so they would have to ready the area if they chose to use it as a quarantine area. I do like the idea of people being quarantined inside a motor home that is a good idea and they have the ability to be comfortable with heat, food storage and water inside.

 

You really need to think over pressure. Our set up uses a filtered fan system that produces a positive pressure in our clean area. Eventually a person(s) will have to leave the clean area. You need to have a decon area set up as well. Kiddie play pools with a shower type wash isn't too hard to set up. I used a RV water pump with a cheap RV type shower head that can be switched on and off. Treated water is supplied via 330 gal totes. RV pump is 12v so it can run a long time on a single deep cycle battery. We have cases of tyvek suits along with the rad meters, dosimeters and .mil MOPP gear.

 

Sealing the room/house...... do you have filtered air intake/exhaust? Don't want to suffocate.

 

Yup.

 

I think this is another good reason to have a few of those $5 baby pools hanging around. I'd add the possibility of a nuclear disaster to the reasons for a decon room.

 

I was in quarintine one time in California they thought I had measals after 3 days in they found out I had Scarlett fever by the way streap throat can turn into Scarlett fever came close to doing me in now my body temp is always running hot

 

You could also use high power UV light like my water purifier to kill any bacteria or viruses in the room.

 

Living in the country, I am not sure I buy into the necessity of having a 'quarantine room.' I mean, there is just the two of us, no family here and doubtful friends would visit in a pandemic environment plus we are quite a distance from the road so... And, I would not allow anyone to come up to the house in there was some type of virus going around so... If the wife got sick, well, then I probably would get sick also.

 

Here, These are every 3 bricks apart
I was told these are vents to let the house breath?

 

No. I am behind on this issue, really lacking. I moved from rural to suburbia. Like Bandit, I did not worry that much about people coming to the door as much when I was in the sticks but now there are people everywhere, one big germfest.

 

While they may be air bricks, it looks more like they just had the concrete worn away.

 

It made me realize that I have never looked at the bottom of a brick home. But it makes sense because wood frame homes have metal vents in them to promote airflow.

 

They are not air holes, they are weep holes.
What are weep holes and do I need them?

 

You appear to be mixing two types of rooms. If you want to protect yourself from bad guys in your home then you want a safe room, not a quarantine room. Plastic is not going to protect you from bad guys no matter what floor you have it on. Now a safe room could also be made into a quarantine room but generally not the other way around.

For a quarantine room inside an open concept home you don't have to go floor to ceiling. Create your own "room" by using pvc tubes and three way joiners in the corners. Create a cube frame, with a door if you want, that is about 7 feet tall. Then attach the plastic to the frame. Add a ventilated air intake to create positive pressure within the room.

A safe room to protect against bad guys needs to be done from scratch or heavily renovated. The regular walls of a home can be penetrated in seconds by simply kicking through the drywall.