Gimme (Fallout) Shelter
President John F. Kennedy created the national fallout shelter system in 1961. Within two years, the five boroughs of New York City were home to about 18,000 officially designated shelters.
This designation process was as faith-based as any religion I’ve ever encountered!
Local “civil defense agents” would survey a building to decide if it could survive (!) a nuclear explosion. Any building deemed indestructible would receive a government-issued placard (see my photo above) to be mounted outside to guide anyone who happened to be fleeing from World War III.
The ostensible belief was that the occupants of the shelter would face only minimal exposure to harmful fallout and could emerge safely once the radioactivity had decayed.
An October 1960 feature in Popular Mechanics explained fallout like this:
By the mid-1960s, it was estimated that some 230,000 such shelters existed in the Big Apple (Google map here) — containing about $30 million worth of food. However, within 10 years, inspectors discovered that some of the shelters contained no supplies at all while many others had been overrun with well-fed rats and roaches.
Hygiene had won out over Cold War paranoia by the late 1970s. The Big Apple’s fallout shelters were cleaned out and reclaimed as storage space.
Today, fallout shelters — and the Office of Civil Defense that created them — have both been relegated to the dustbin of history. All that’s left are some of the fading ghost signs. NYC has been aiming to remove them, claiming: “At best, they are ignored, at worst, they're misleading and are going to cost people's lives.”
“Going to cost people's lives.” Where have I heard that one before?
Anyway, I’m rooting for the fallout shelter sign removal to be as unsuccessful as the shelters themselves. Let the relics remain — like a multi-location museum highlighting yet another example of State-sponsored misinformation and mismanagement.
My ex husband worked in a nuclear power plant. With the Chernobyl disaster pills were handed out. He told me the alarm went off when people came in with a home grown salad... and that the best place to be in a nuclear war was exactly where the bomb falls, then you are dead on the spot. Otherwise, you will die a sad death within the next few years. I don't know if any of these shelters will protect anyone. Just hoping politicians will be smarter than to use nuclear bombs to solve a stupid conflict they caused themselves.
I grew up in a NJ suburb. My father had brochures for underground fallout shelters that could be built in our backyard.