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#Post#: 249--------------------------------------------------
Fallout Lore - The Great War's aftermath.
By: Fluttershy Date: September 30, 2012, 4:48 am
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Many American citizens did not heed the air raid sirens on
October 23, 2077, believing them to be signaling just another
drill. The Vaults sealed in their inhabitants as the Earth
burned in atomic fire. A few citizens took shelter where they
could: sewers, and subway stations, drainage centers, Pulowski
preservation shelters, or in the case of the Keller Family, the
National Guard Depot. However, without a very strong outer
shield of dense metal or rock to defend them from both the heat
and kinetic shockwave of the nuclear blasts (such as Lamplight
Caverns or Raven Rock), few civilians survived the full-out
nuclear exchange. Some who were exposed to high levels of
radiation became ghouls, and some of these ghouls, in turn,
formed their own communities. Those who survived the nuclear
exchange would form the basis for the brutal civilization that
existed for the next 20 years, until the first Vaults re-opened.
Despite the global destruction caused by the war, many areas
remained habitable, with low and tolerable levels of radioactive
fallout. The surviving humans were in some parts of the Earth
able to continue living in the ruins of the pre-War
civilization, establishing new communities and even small
cities.
Around a week after the initial nuclear explosions, rain started
to fall; however, none of it was drinkable. The rain was black;
tainted with soot, ash, radioactive elements produced by the
nuclear explosions and various other contaminants produced by
nuclear weapons. This rain marked the start of the terrible
fallout that marked the true, permanent destruction caused by
the Great War. The rain lasted four long days, killing thousands
of species that had survived the initial destruction of the
bombs, be they animal, plant or micro-organisms. Those few
living things, human, animal or plant, that survived after the
rain ended were left to live in the now barren wasteland that
had spread across the Earth, where nearly all pre-War plant life
had died either in the initial explosions or from the intense
radiation produced by the fallout.
Some major global cities were not completely destroyed by the
explosions because of their relatively low explosive yields, and
cities such as Washington, D.C. even managed to maintain intact
buildings despite relatively close detonations. However, most
city streets across the post-nuclear United States were and
continue to be blocked with rubble from collapsing edifices. In
the ruins of Washington, D.C., most of the city's Metro system
of subways remained intact. Though many Metro tunnels were
blocked by collapsed masonry caused by the shock of the atomic
explosions, the Metro's tunnel network remains the easiest, if
not the only, way to move around the D.C. ruins.
Thanks to the efforts of Robert House, most of the city of Las
Vegas, Nevada and the Hoover Dam remained intact, and many
buildings still have electricity as of 2281. In the pre-War era,
about 20 years before the Great War, House predicted when the
bombs would fall. In the meantime he installed defenses such as
laser turrets on the roof of the Lucky 38 Casino, which
destroyed most of the incoming Chinese ballistic missiles before
they hit Las Vegas. Had his Platinum chip been delivered only a
day earlier, an even greater area of the Mojave Wasteland could
have been spared the terrible destruction. In time, the remains
of Las Vegas came to be known as New Vegas.
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