Well you know how near the entrance to the presidental metro thier is a giant fence blocking you from just going into the white house.
On it is signs telling of extreme radiation and warnings. I just wonder "Who put up the fence?"

I mean no one would care that much to put up the fence. Was it already around the white house? This is just weird. I need to know.

I noticed the extreme radiation warnings and cleanup signs. Two possible theories:

1) the White house was hit with a small nuclear weapon relatively early on.

2) Similar to the situation at Germantown Police station, some folks in DC tried to keep some resembalance of order, the nuclear decontamination crew, or at least some of them, reported for work; unsure what else they should really do or out of a sense of loyalty, duty or honour.

yeah the first theory is what I think. Not so sure about the second but I haven't been to germantown police hq in a while.

I always thought it was sabotage/special forces attack. There were apparently Chines special forces all over the place.

yep like mama doces

There are old military checkpoints with radiation warning signs scattered around the wasteland, presumably the barricade around the White House shares a similar origin.

There's signs all around Vault 87 telling you to stay the hell away, too.

i've always wondered this, and this may have to do with broken steel...but when i first went to the rockland car tunnel, there were no trucks there...after doing the quest...there were trucks there, and they had brotherhood of steel water...WTF??? can they use cars?

i actually tried to get to the front door of vault 87, took me about 100 radaway, and there were only wastelander clothes and a bit of radaway...please note that i had max radiation resistance when i tried this...yeah...

It was probably BoS who put the barricade up, since their is a small outpost near the White House.

A better question is: Who was the psycho who set up two ramps in the sewer underneath - the one that leads you to the White House beyond those barriers - either side of a car, and tried to jump it on a motorcycle only to catch his head on the light above, which he remains dangling from in skeletal form to this day? Was that the then President?

And even better question is: How did whoever that guy or gal was... manage to get a car and a motorcycle down there in the first place!

well I think the tunnels lead around D.C and it caved in. That's what I can make of it.

Surviving Civil Defense and National Guard units probably set up some form of emergency government that only survived long enough to begin containment and clean-up procedures. I'm kinda surprised a HQ for it wasn't included so you could pick up the story of the last days of any kind of organized gov't in the CW.

Brings up an interesting question as to what happened to the US Civil Defense volunteers.....did they simply disband, or were they overcome by radiation?

They were probably wiped out by a combination of radiation and attrition as individual members deserted to look after themselves and thier families....it may also have been snuffed out by the earliest Raider bands, who would have been far more dangerous due to being better armed and possibly even being rouge military and/or police units. I suspect the CW was largely abandoned within five years after the War....except for a handful of places like Underworld, Megaton, the survivalists in the hills who founded what is now the Republic of Dave, the kids in Lamplight, and the Chinese holdouts....The other major settlements such as Rivet City, TT, and Canterbury Commons are less than fifty years old, Paradise Falls probably only a little older than that. It was probably only within the last 100 years that the CW began to slowly re-populate outside the fortified settlements that had survived....with much of the growth taking place after Lyons arrived and began trying to push the mutants back. From Dashwood's terminal in TT there weren't many settlements 20-40 years ago when he was actively adventuring.

Though we must also consider, that Fallout 3's timeline is fairly inconsistent with the Original Fallout's. Since after all, by this point(on the West Coast), the NCR and depending on your choices during Fallout 2 other cities etc. are growing and expanding into the Southwest. I always found it odd, that the East Coast seemed so devoid of life and settlements, to be honest it never made much sense.

Wow good question OP, never thought of that.

Good point but trying to consolidate FO3 story/game play with FO1-2 (even tactics) will make ones head hurt? its like time travel the more you think about it the less it makes any sense so I say hang it all and roll with it, this is of course a survival tactic because I totally miss the old fallouts and long for a day when we would have got a sequel more in line with the classic games, don't get me wrong I think FO3 is great and its strengths out weight its flaws but as Futurerama's professor said about what it would have been like inventing the finglonger "a man can dream? a man can dream"

It's not that odd. People just came out of the vaults later than they did on the west coast.

And there were different challenges on each coast (The East coast had to deal with a Large SuperMutant threat far earlier, and for much longer than California, etc)

Civil Defense workers helped as long as they could but probably died because of radiation, you can read the diary of a volunteer nurse at the Germantown PD that talks about trying to help people after the war.

It was some hapless do-gooder type who no doubt became one of the wastelands many ghouls.

I tend to agree, which is why I wish they had set FO3 earlier then they did. I'm also hoping New Vegas is set earlier. I like Fallout best when the world is still messed up.

That said, you can kind of make it work when you think about how FO Tactics (which is treated at least partially as canon by FO3) presents the midwest as still being pretty chaotic even after the events of Fallout 2. Probably the best way to think about it is to assume that the west coast is recovering faster and the east coast is slower. Civilization is moving west to east.

On the other hand, there are hints in FO3 that maybe things weren't so bad the whole time since the war and that there has been a relapse. After all, Vault 101 was open at one point and then closed. The adventures of "Daring" Dashwood refer to locations and other incidents that no longer exist, not to mention the implications of his story being turned into radio plays. It all suggests the possibility that things were improving and then went backwards.

Keep in mind that unlike the intelligent mutants at Mariposa, the huge population of mutants in Washington D.C. would love to have a wastelander as a snack without thinking (which they are barely capable of aside from 2 exceptions), lessening the rate of re-population. There is also only one functioning GECK in DC, guarded by a mutant army.

Thats right! In Fallout 2, every vault suddenly had GECK's ready to go. Vault 13 had two.

The explanation that I heard for the GECK in Vault 87 being so different was that Braun's specifications for a GECK were so costly that only a handful could be made. The GECK's we see on the west coast are cheap versions of the original GECK design. Where instead of terraforming technology, you got seeds, fertilizer, a portable nuclear reactor, and instructions on how to rebuild civilization. All of which weren't really expected to work anywhere near the glorious description Vault-Tec advertised.