I was at an intersection yesterday, waiting for the light, and I happened to glance at a bank building across the street. On the side was one of those 3-triangle symbols, with the words “FALLOUT SHELTER-CAPACITY 50 PERSONS”. I remember that the US Goverbmnt used to stock these things with bandages, inedible biscuits, and cans of drinking water. Is this still done? Do we have a government agency still employing people to maintain these things? What are the chances of leasing a few of them-they would make great nightclubs or storage areas.Please tell we that we still aren’t paying taxes for some obscure Federal agency that still thinks a Russian nuclesar attack is imminent:D
Russian attack may not be immenent but we are still in as much danger as ever. Dirty nukes and other technologies have come to surface that make suicide bombers look like M80’s.
As for weather these shelters are still maintained or not, many of them are. Not nessicarly for protection from nuclear attack but for disaster purposes. As a member of my local C.E.R.T. (Citizen Emergency Response Team) we are supposed to know the nearest suppply storage locations in case of emergency. In my area those being tornados and floods.
Now, if you REALLY want protection check out 20th Century Castles . There a site in Colorado for sale I would love to have. Imagine having 45,000 square feet of climet controlled habital space! I could finally have that indoor rock-climbing wall and scuba park I’ve always wanted.
Within the last few weeks, I saw a news segment on MSNBC with Ashleigh Banfield hosting; she went into one of those shelters (in NYC, I believe) to show people what condition most of them are in. They aren’t maintained more than what the building owners might do, and the supplies haven’t been replenished by any government agency. She showed the rat-eaten cracker ration remnants, the rusted-through water drums, the medical kit with expired medications. She also pointed out that this particular shelter wouldn’t have been good against a nuclear attack, as it had windows.
As we recently learned, at least some of them are still being used.
Well the bakcyard fallout shelters are useable as a shed or if you wish to secretly grow pot, but as far as surviving a nuclear bomb they are completly useless. Of course, back when they were built, it was thought that by “ducking and covering” that you could shield yourself from the effects of a nuclear blast.
No.
Supposedly, even Norad is no longer safe from the affects of a nuclear attack.
Heh. I went to a party once in a 50’s era house that had an underground room known as the “bong shelter.”
A survey done by the US Civil Defense authority just before it closed it’s doors found none of the fifty public shelters it inspected had been maintained as planned. When I was trained as a fallout shelter manager, in 1966, I was told not to expect any of the supplies or equipment to be adequate.
Tris
Rule of Reason: “If nobody uses it, there’s a reason.”
Years ago, the church I attended had a Civil Defense designated “bomb shelter” in the basement. The supplies had become outdated by about 10 years and we threw most of it out. It was interesting to see all the instructions that came with the supplies.
There were crackers that were supposed to “swell up” in your stomach to make you feel full and carbohydrate pills (candy) there was no real food. There was water, medical supplies including antibiotics and Phenobarbital (that should keep everyone calm) and even a Geiger counter.
I can’t imagine living for several weeks on water, crackers and candy, but I suppose it could be done. The question is; would there be anything left worth living for?
When I was in first grade, we had “bomb drills.” When the teacher would yell, “duck,” we would all scramble under our desks. In retrospect, I often wonder whose brilliant idea that was. I’m sure those old wood desks would shield us from a nuclear blast.
I guess they didn’t want to tell us that we would all be reduced to ash – makes for some nasty nightmares.
Dr. Strangemind
At the university library where I used to work, the answer would be no (not as a fallout shelter, anyway–as storage, absolutely!). They still had the sign for it (pointing down the staff stairs to the subbasement), but one of the guys who worked down there told me that they had cleaned it out a while ago–they needed more space for books, of course! They discovered that the supplies at the university had not been evenly distributed at all. Seems that, for the most part, one building got the crackers, another got the water, etc. Guess what the library got? Toilet paper. OK, toilet paper is important. However, if there is one thing you could “make do” without in a library, TP would be it, I’d think.
Once the “cold war” ended, they pretty much shitcanned fallout shelters utterly. Personally, I believe this was a huge mistake. At least in the past, certain important information was transmitted and disseminated via various government agencies – whether the Army or Civil Defense, at least nominally it appeared somebody was in charge and knew what the hell was going on.
The official line today almost seems to be “Well, we’re going to get nuked, we’ll just have to learn to live with it, Oh Well…” and we just get Katie Couric on the TV attempting to put on a gas mask. Pretty frickin’ scary.
For a neat site on Civil Defense shelters back when men were men go to:
I think that the end of the fallout shelter stuff was when President Carter came up with some plan that everyone would drive out of the target zone and live elsewhere when the nukes were falling. I think that he actually got Congressional approval (read:money) for this plan.
A friend of mine used to follow his father around at work as a maintenence man in several buuildings in downtown Rochester, NY. At that time (the early 80s) there were still a handful of buildings that still had fallout shelters. One of the features of a fallout shelter is that it has to be accessible to the public at all times, since a fallout shelter isn’t much good if you can’t get in it. I would bet that, nowadays, you can’t. So from a civil defense perspective, they wouldn’t be usable at all.
Well, yes and no. Not to belittle current threats, but they don’t really compare to a major thermonuclear exchange, do they ?
Fallout shelters with emergency rations may be a reasonable precaution if you fear a 1000+ warheads and destruction of infrastructure on a national scale. People will need to hunker down and ride it out, because no help will arrive for a long time. But that threat picture is probably not relevant after the fall of the Soviet Union.
If you can reasonably count on being able to evacuate people out of the fallout/contamination pattern - i.e., there’s somewhere safe to evacuate to, suitable vehicles (commandeered SUVs 
), trained personnel etc., you’re probably better off by planning and training for just that.
S. Norman
Thanks for that link, Tedster. Seems that what the guy was talking about was the sanitation kits–I remember him describing them as “big drums full of toilet paper.” Technically, they were the toilets as well.
I got the impression from that site that many of the shelters were “dual-use”–the rooms were used for other purposes, but they happened to have the emergency supplies in a closet or corner just in case. Therefore, not only are those rooms being used for other purposes now, they were used for other purposes then as well.
That site certainly made me think, though. I couldn’t imagine spending two weeks in the dark, crowded subbasement of the library, with only 700 calories worth of crackers and candy a day. The possible horror inherant in the scenario almost equals the horror inherant in nuclear war itself.
Hence the large supply of Phenobarbital.
Dr. Strangemind
handsomeharry writes:
> I think that the end of the fallout shelter stuff was when
> President Carter came up with some plan that everyone would
> drive out of the target zone and live elsewhere when the
> nukes were falling. I think that he actually got Congressional
> approval (read:money) for this plan.
Cite? I don’t remember any such thing. The fallout shelters had pretty much been forgotten by Carter’s time and were already accepted as being no more than sick jokes. Being lackadaisical about the consequences of nuclear war was more typical of Reagan than Carter. Carter understood what it meant to be in charge of the nuclear trigger and insisted on being shown all the details of what would happen if Soviet missiles were detected coming toward the U.S. and how we would respond. He actually learned the details of how he could choose a response. (It’s not just pushing a button. The President has to make a choice of retaliation strategies.) On the other hand, Reagan, who was always vague on details, might not have been able to understand the instructions on launching our missiles in retaliation for a Soviet strike quickly enough to make a difference. Despite this, it was Reagan who was bigger on increasing our nuclear capabilities.
There was a “fallout shelter” in an old apartment building I lived in.
It was under a cement staircase that was exposed to the outside element.
When I lived there (1982) I was supprised to find many of the supplies were still there. The toilet barrel and toilet paper, the crackers, a few other boxes I didn’t look in. Strange as how this was outside. I would have expected all this stuff to be looted long ago.
As a shelter, it was worthless. If it was raining outside and you were in the shelter, if the wind blew just right you might get wet.
There was another shelter I found in downtown Seattle under the an old movie theatre downtown (now a banana rebublic or something) . It seemed more logical as a shelter. It was in a room in the basement behind the bathrooms. Fairly large in size. It was off the beaten path for the general staff that worked there and I would happen to guess not many even knew how to get in there. I only found it by mistake when the movie thearte was closing and the lot of us at the show were given free run of the building.
The room looked like it had been lived in in the past. It also looked as it was used to peep on people in the bathrooms. There were a few holes in the wall about eyeball height which looked right into the stalls of the bathroom.
Most of the supplies were still there as well. Boxes and boxes AND BOXES of crackers and the toilet barrels w/the seats that fit on top them.
As the entire place was slated to be gutted, I took two tins of the crackers. I still have one tin today but I’ve been too scared to open them.
There’s a fallout shelter for public viewing at Peanut Island (an artificial island designed with the JFK Fallout shelter in the 60s) , Palm Beach, Florida. We camped there a few years ago and went for a nice tour of the insides. More at http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0401/ob/ob7.html