The other buildings are still around, but all vestiges of their use as a shelter vanished even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union.Īccording to Colby, all fallout shelters had to meet specific government criteria. The shelter on Murray Street has been gone even longer. The jail has been gone for nearly 20 years. Civil defense coordinators were appointed and the shelters were marked and stocked with provisions. Government architects and engineers visited communities throughout the country and identified places where people could take shelter for a couple of weeks. They were meant to protect people from the radiation that would carry on the wind after a nuclear attack elsewhere. And so began a program by the Department of Defense to open public shelters where citizens could ride out an attack.įrom the start, the shelters were designed as fallout, not bomb, shelters. Kennedy called on Congress to set aside money to begin building a national civil defense system that would help the country survive the unthinkable. Now a husband and father with school-aged children of his own, Colby maintains a website – – that keeps tabs on news about the civil defense program as well as a history of the shelters.Īmerica started bracing for the possibility of nuclear attack, he said, even before the Cuban missile crisis brought doomsday tensions to a head. While going to school in the city, he became intrigued by old signs designating his middle school as an emergency fallout shelter.
If you purchase these poles, instead of chopping them down yourself, you're looking at an average cost of about $20 per log, or $400 for 20 logs.Sean Colby grew up in Boston and still works there as a firefighter. The poles should over-hang the edges by at least a foot in order to help support the soil on top. Step 4: Once you've dug your trench, lay your wooden poles over top of it. A basic 3-by-11 foot waterproof tarp should run you between $20-$40. Step 3: When completed, place waterproof material over each end of the shelter to form an overhead canopy - this should keep your shelter dry as well as catch any dropping fallout. It should be about two feet wide by three and a half feet deep - it's basically a crawl space and can double as an emergency exit for smaller individuals. Dig this trench just under the ground's surface with an opening to the surface at the end of it. At the other end of the trench, dig a five-foot-long ventilation trench to help circulate air. Step 2: Next, dig a five-foot-long entrance with steps or a slope down into the main area. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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