in tornado country they’re now called tornado shelters. same idea;fewer supplies.
My grandfather had one on his property in Texas and I assume it was still there. It wasn’t well stocked and it had about an inch of water in it with an amazing number of frogs but it was pretty big and you could still use it if you had to in a pinch. It doubled as a tornado shelter as well. He and his girlfriend used it to escape a tornado about 10 years ago so it was good for something. I have seen nuclear fallout signs leading to the basements of buildings in downtown Boston as recently as 10 years ago as well.
My grandparents live about three blocks away from the “Electchester” apartment building in Queens, NY. There are definitely signs for fallout shelters that can be seen on the building. I have no idea if they’re still maintained.
Reminds me of the guy in the basement in Delicatessen.
It wasn’t really misguided. Obviously if a nuclear bomb was detonated point blank above your shelter, it wouldn’t matter - but there’s a huge radius (far bigger than the immediately kill zone) where the biggest dangers of a nuclear blast are stuff like flying glass, fire, and eventually, fallout. You could be protected in a fallout shelter in anything that wasn’t around the immediate vicinity of the strike itself - they would’ve saved a lot of people.
Yeah, saved them to die of radiation poisoning.
No, it’s where they hang out, sleep, and work on their skateboards.
At least, that’s what I learned when I watched Gleaming the Cube
There was a British documentary on nuclear war that aired in the early 1980’s and is available on google videowherein they followed government guidelines to make shelters from fallout. These varied from rudimentary holes in the ground, covered by a door and some earth, to more elaborate American style fallout shelters. The narrator posed a number of interesting questions. When precisely would you decide it was time to get in the shelter, and would you defend your shelter with force from neighbours and the like who also wanted to use it?
It is a short documentary but I recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
While this is doubtless a clever use of otherwise discarded materials, wouldn’t it be easier to make the shelters from more conventional material, like wood and concrete?
Well, no. Many of the radioisotopes produced in a nuclear explosion (the fallout) have a fairly short half life. The whole point of a fallout shelter is to provide a place that will both protect you from the initial blast, and where you can wait until much of the most dangerous radioactivity has decayed. This period was estimated at two to three weeks. While there would still be some radioactivity, it would be much less severe than at first.
What is the appeal in surviving a post-nuclear holocaust?
Seems to me it would be a lot like living in Hell. Why would anyone want that>
My syntax was a bit dodgy but it is nearly 6am. Anyway my point was that they weren’t all actually “fallout shelters” as the OP described, hence the wording etc. ad nauseum, e unibus plurum.
It’s not as bad as popular culture makes it out to be, and people are big on the whole surviving thing.
There was a great old documentary called “the Atomic Cafe” that’s all about sort of the cultural milieu of the cold war especially with regards to atomic bombs. At one point there’s a clip of (IIRC) a Catholic priest discussing this very issue-- should you let someone else in your fallout shelter. (I think he said you didn’t have to let them in).
It used to be you could get very low interest loans from the government to build a fallout shelter, but in the later 50’s they decided that communal shelters (like the ones you still see signs for in public buildings) were more effective and canceled the program. Part of it was that the cheap you-dig-it shelters wouldn’t have really been much more effective than, say, holing up in your basement.
Because 1) a nuclear war wouldn’t necessarily have been as bad as the apocalyptic scenarios depicted in popular fiction. A war could have involved a partial rather than a full exchange, and areas away from major population centers may have been relatively little affected; 2) regardless of the threat, people like to maximize their chances of survival.
Anyone remember that Twilight Zone episode where there’s a report of a nuclear attack & only one guy in the neighborhood has a bomb shelter? It depicts the neighbors all turning on him and descending into this panicked primal weirdness. Then it turns out to be a false alarm, of course. Great Rod Serling mindf**k!
This house is near me, though I don’t know exactly where.
An issue of Weird NJ had an article on a guy who has an old fallout shelter in his backyard - with the ‘sealed’ emergency food still in place. The photos show the place would have been rather ‘cozy’ for a family of four as it was a walk-in closet sized shelter. It was dusty, dirty, and was showing signs of nature winning.
I think the write-up is in the second Weird NJ book.
As seen in this instructional video.
I recall a Far Side cartoon where a guy is half out of a fallout shelter hatch in the ground. “Thank God, Sylvia, we’re alive!” he says. And out to the horizon there’s nothing but a burning wasteland left.