◎Happy 108th Day: Insulated Room◎
When the sandstorm just arrived and the thick layer of sand blocked the sunlight, the temperature in Nanshi City dropped significantly.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. As time went on, the temperature of the upper layer of dust spread downwards. Even though it was still pitch black outside, the temperature at the door of Jiang Muyun's house was gradually rising, all the way up from a maximum of over 20 degrees.
More than a week after the polar day, Jiang Muyun measured the temperature at his doorstep generally around 32 or 33 degrees.
Half a month after the polar day, the temperature outside Jiang Muyun's house reached 40 degrees Celsius.
Seeing that the situation was not right, Jiang Muyun decided to make preparations early.
The sun was very hot on the sand, but it didn't seem that hot to the survivors in Nanshi and its surrounding areas.
After all, no matter how hot the sunlight shining on the blue planet is, it can never be hotter than the sea of fire passing through it.
It is definitely enough to deal with their mortal bodies.
Those who were once one step away from the kiln chicken can be said to be experienced and have deep shadows about this situation.
At the beginning, the passage of the sea of fire was at least measured in minutes, so if one really died, it would only take a few minutes or even tens of seconds.
It’s different now.
Now it is counted in days, weeks, and even months.
The temperature under the sand layer certainly doesn't reach hundreds of degrees, but baking at just seventy or eighty degrees is uncomfortable enough.
If that time really comes, their lives will definitely be worse than when they passed through the sea of fire. At least people can still give them a quick death and won't torture them so much.
Therefore, when it comes to taking precautions against high temperatures during the polar day, everyone can be said to be more proactive than the other.
Even Wu Xingyue, who had just escaped death, did not resist the fact that they were going to be working in the wind and sand for a long time.
If you want to prevent yourself from being buried in the sand and cooked, you need to make preparations in two main directions.
One is to lower the temperature inside the cave, and the other is to block the outside temperature.
The former was not a big problem for Jiang Muyun and others who had saltpeter in their hands and a cellar full of ice.
While the temperature outside is still within the normal range, they can open the underground ice cellar and use the ice in it first.
When the temperature rises later and there is a risk of burns when walking in the wind and sand, people will stay in the cave and use saltpeter to make ice to cool down.
Of course, since there is a need to make ice with saltpeter, there must be enough water.
So they added fetching water to their plan.
In addition to the small reservoir they dug in their own cave when they first moved to the mountain, and the large reservoir they dug last winter, they also dug a number of scattered small reservoirs in recent times.
Because they were worried that the water in the reservoir would be contaminated by sand and dust, everyone put a cover on the top of the reservoir before the sandstorm arrived.
And they are all double-layered.
One layer seals the mouth of the reservoir tightly to prevent ordinary dust, and the other layer has a slope like the sand barrier at the door of their house to prevent sand from accumulating and collapsing the cover of the reservoir.
The large reservoir can be left untouched for the time being, but all the water in the small reservoir must be transported back home.
Even if you don't use it to make ice, you can still cool down and increase humidity by placing it at home.
This time, there is no such thing as being able to go out only at specific times.
After all, it is polar day plus sandstorms. When the temperature rises, as long as these two things exist at the same time, they cannot step out of the house.
No one would want to walk in the dust at 70 or 80 degrees.
Compared with the act of baking themselves, the danger of going out in the sandstorm was nothing.
It is also quite troublesome to get water.
If they don't want to carry back half a bucket of water and half a bucket of sand, they must take precautions during the entire water-collecting process.
Jiang Muyun has quite a lot of experience in this area, and she and Chu Buwen pieced together a relatively feasible plan.
They planned to move their already set up tent directly to the water point.
Set up the tent in a dust-free room, and then the people who acted together would meet at the home of the person in charge of setting up the tent, and carry the tent to the water point in the wind and sand.
At that time, turn the tent upside down with the door facing down and close the water inlet of the reservoir. People can then directly enter the tent and lift part of the reservoir cover to get water.
Once the water is collected and the lids of the reservoir and water containers are covered, put the tent away.
This process does not require too many people. Due to the size of the tent, only one person can fetch water in the tent. Too many people will only get in the way.
The place where manpower is most needed is on the road. They have to ensure that the tents are not blown away by the wind, so having too few people is not acceptable.
Considering the safety issues when walking outside, everyone was divided into two groups according to the distance of their residence.
Jiang Muyun, Chu Buwen, Qin Shiwen and Qin Shiwu lived close to each other, so they went together to fetch water, and chose Chu Buwen's house, which was located in the central area, as the meeting place.
Zhao Jiahao and Wang Qingqing and the other six lived relatively close to each other, so they could act together. The meeting place was finally set at the home of Wang Qingqing and her four children.
Apart from the fact that one could not stand up straight in the tent and had to kneel or bend over to fetch water, which caused everyone to have back or leg pain, and the fact that someone was always holding a rope to be ready for rescue when fetching water to prevent the person fetching water from losing their balance and falling forward into the pool, the whole water-fetching process went relatively smoothly.
After all, their reservoirs were sealed with wooden boards or membranes, and except for the small hole they opened when taking water, the rest was nailed shut.
If a person accidentally falls into a reservoir and turns off the light source, he or she may not be able to climb out by himself or herself.
By the way, the unlucky guy who fell into the reservoir while fetching water was Qin Shiwu.
Qin Shiwu could swear to heaven that he definitely did not fall because of an unstable center of gravity.
He clearly slipped while fetching water and fell directly into the reservoir.
After Qin Shiwen went back and posted this matter on WeChat Moments, Qin Shiwu was so angry that he kept saying "Ahhh" countless times, until Qin Shiwen had to give in and pulled the bell three times to indicate that he would delete the previous post.
At that time, Qin Shiwu left a message saying that if Qin Shiwen had not refused to open the door, he would definitely rush to Qin Shiwen's house to help her delete the circle of friends.
Everyone can split up to fetch water, but building the insulated room is not possible.
It was previously said that Jiang Muyun and others had to make two preparations: one was to lower the temperature inside the cave, and the other was to block the temperature from the outside.
The insulated room is prepared for the latter.
As the name suggests, a heat-insulating room is a small house that has the function of blocking temperature.
The insulated room they are preparing now will be built at the entrance of their own cave.
When it comes to blocking the outside temperature, people like Jiang Muyun who live in caves have a natural advantage.
The thick mountain walls can provide them with sufficient shelter, but the sand does not have the ability to heat up the entire mountain like burning crude oil.
Unless this big sun can really shine on it for a year or two without setting.
If it really comes to this, then there's nothing to say and just dig a hole.
If you don't dig twenty or thirty meters underground, no one will be able to see the night fall alive.
They have not yet reached the stage where they have to dig a hole, so what Jiang Muyun and others need to protect now is the area at their doorstep that is not protected by the mountain.
At least we have to keep the scorching sand and dust away from our doorstep.
This is the largest project, even larger than their water transportation project.
After all, you build a house with your bare hands.
This insulated house is not for long-term use. It will have to be dismantled after the polar day is over to avoid blocking the light for the home. Therefore, they do not need strong materials such as bricks, stones and yellow mud. A simple wooden house will do.
Although this house is not for living and does not have any structural requirements, it will take them a lot of effort just to gather the materials needed to build the house.
All the trees have to be cut down right away.
Because all the existing wood had been processed into firewood about one foot long by their hardworking people, there was not a single unprocessed tree trunk.
They can't use this firewood to build an insulated room.
Carpentry work requires a lot of people, including those who light lamps, cut trees, process wood, and build houses.
In order to prevent sand from accumulating on the roof of the insulation room and collapsing the small square boxes built by these amateurs, they also had to make the roof of the insulation room into a slope.
A smooth, seamless surface is best.
Prevent sand from sneaking into the insulation room.
This smooth and seamless surface was obviously not something that a group of half-baked carpenters could build using stick-shaped tree trunks.
So they could only use the clumsy method. They cut the tree trunk into wooden boards, and then spliced the long wooden boards together to form a large smooth and seamless wooden board. They then placed several large wooden boards on the beams and pieced them together to form a roof, minimizing the possibility of gaps on the roof.
They had thought about being lazy and using the sand barrier that was previously propped up at the door as a roof.
However, the sand barrier looked quite large before, but once the scale of each insulation room was planned, the sand barrier became a tiny thing.
Even when it was put together with the wooden strips to form a new large wooden board, people would complain that the length was not right.
After all, the purpose of building the insulation room is to isolate the sand and dust, so of course the farther away the better.
If there were not enough flat land at the entrance of each cave to accommodate the insulation room, they would have wanted to extend the insulation room two miles outward.
The area of the insulation room should be as large as possible, and the walls should be as thick as possible, so the trees they cut down only needed to be processed in length, which saved them a lot of trouble.
It doesn't matter if the cut tree trunks are of different thicknesses. They would rather use thinner tree trunks to fill the gaps after the general frames of several insulation rooms are formed, rather than choose to thin the thicker tree trunks.
Especially since the doorway to Jiang Muyun's house is a stone platform, it is impossible to hammer the tree trunks used to build the walls of the wooden house into the ground to fix them. The only way is to build supports around the wooden insulation house and increase the weight of the insulation house to reduce the possibility of the insulation house being displaced by the wind.
After building the walls of the insulation room, they also spliced the cut wooden boards according to the area framed by the walls, and fixed the insulation cotton, emergency life blankets and other heat-insulating items they had brought back earlier on the wooden boards.
These things are precious materials that can save lives at critical moments. They are reluctant to nail them to the wooden boards. Even if they are dismantled, there will inevitably be holes left.
So they decided to make the roof wooden boards double-layered, and sandwich insulation cotton and other materials between the two layers of wood as a mezzanine.
Once the insulated room is ready to be dismantled, pry open the double-layer wooden planks so that the insulation and life-saving blanket in the middle remain intact.
It is indeed troublesome and time-consuming, but there is no other way. Who can blame them for being poor and having few supplies?
Wang Qingqing knocked on the wooden board and felt sad for herself: "I really miss the firefighting supplies in that warehouse. Wrapping ourselves in insulation blankets would have been enough to withstand the fire. If we had emptied the entire Nanshan warehouse, we would have just covered our homes with insulation blankets now, and wouldn't have needed to build an insulated room!"
A roll of thermal insulation blanket takes up quite a bit of space, and their transportation capacity was limited at the time, so only two or three people could work together to bring back a roll as a backup.
They did take quite a few emergency blankets. Except for the one that would be fixed to their front door later and the one that they kept with them just in case, they stuffed the rest into the mezzanine of the insulation room.
Even so, the insulation materials they had were still not enough to fill the roof mezzanine of the insulated room. They could only lay the part closest to the cave first, and fill the rest with cotton wool taken out of old quilts.
Wu Xingyue swung a hammer and hammered a long nail into the edge of the wooden board. "Don't dream, sister. If you have that ability, why don't we just occupy Nanshan and cover the entire warehouse with insulation? Why would we be afraid of the polar day?"
"Think of it this way: the supplies we left behind saved countless lives, and their merits are immeasurable." Jiang Muyun did have the ability to empty the warehouse, but she only took a small portion. It was so small that even if Zhao Jiahao and others went back to check after she had collected everything, they might not have noticed that anything was missing.
The reason is simple: there is no need.
The thermal insulation blanket is not a gun, bullet, or ammunition that would pose a threat to her if it fell into the hands of others. No matter how many she took, they would just be piled up in the space to look good.
There are already enough things in her space, so why should she do things to the extreme and cut off the lives of other survivors?
And with so many supplies missing, who knows which survivor might guess it was due to space?
Who among the contemporary young people has not read a few fantasy novels and fantasized about having a portable space of their own?
Even a lonely guy like Tang An, who devoted himself to training before the end of the world, had a dream about space.
Tang An, who was diligently digging a cellar far away at the South One Base, rarely lost his serious persona. He leaned against the cliff wall, drank a sip of water, and after catching his breath for a while, he jokingly said, "If I had a space right now where I could point and dig whatever hole I wanted, I wouldn't have to suffer this."
Her boyfriend swung his hoe and asked, "Will you still want me then?"
As soon as these words were spoken, the team members who were working around immediately started to make a fuss.
Some people promoted themselves to Tang An and asked her to change her, while others seriously refuted the other party, saying that the atmosphere had been set to this point, and it would be unreasonable not to have a harem with three husbands and four maids.
Since the temperature at South One Base was discovered to be abnormal, they have been digging an underground shelter.
They had no machines and could only dig the mountain with their bare hands. Sometimes they would encounter large rocks that were impossible to pry out and all their efforts would be wasted. They would have to move to another place and start over.
It’s tiring both physically and mentally.
It was a rare opportunity to have a light-hearted topic to talk about, and everyone was as excited as if they had drunk half a pound of Erguotou.
Tang An held up a shovel and hit those who were talking nonsense one by one: "Get to work. If we can't finish digging the cellar later and the temperature rises, we will really be separated in life and death."
The abnormal temperature difference between day and night is very obvious.
Jiang Muyun and others discovered it, the people from the South One Base discovered it, the North District Base, the Dawn Base, the team left behind in the western suburbs, and countless survivors hiding in the ruins of the city, all noticed this unusual thing.
The survivors living in the mountains and forests dug holes and expanded caves inside the mountains.
Among the survivors living in the city, some moved to underground buildings with their families, while others had abundant supplies and could equip their shelters with various insulation materials.
There are even survivors living in rural areas on the outskirts of the city who once stored a cellar of ice for the winter and are now thinking of moving into the ice cellar if all else fails.
On the day when the insulation rooms for Jiang Muyun and others were completed, the South One Base officially began to move supplies into their various cellars in preparation for the possible relocation.
The North District Base cleared out their largest warehouse and transformed this huge cave deep into the mountain into a temporary shelter.
The Dawn Base was originally located in a village on the outskirts of the city. Every household in the village had a cellar. After receiving the warning from the base, the survivors began to build huts at the entrance of the cellar to block the wind and sand, so as to prevent themselves from taking refuge in the cellar and having the cellar exit blocked by sand and dust.
Compared with the coming high temperatures, the danger of long-term exposure to sandstorms has become less of a concern.
More and more people are leaving their homes wearing face masks and scarves, desperately trying to survive.
Jiang Muyun and others filled all their containers that could be used to store water, packed up their tents, and brushed off the hot sand and dust on their bodies.
Jiang Muyun carried a bucket of water and waved goodbye to everyone in the wind and sand.
Jiang Muyun closed the simple wooden door of the insulation room and nailed the bolt shut. He carefully checked the insulation covering the door to make sure it was secure and stable and wouldn't fall off suddenly.
There is also a small passage they left for the rope bell, which is surrounded by soft cotton cloth. It does make it more difficult to pull the rope bell, but it can prevent the dust from trying to squeeze into the insulation room along the passage.
Everything is ready, today is their last time going out.
Wisps of hot air entangled with the dense sand and dust, greedily spreading downwards, gazing at its prey buried under the thick black sand.
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