“They probably turned them back into laundry rooms and things like that.” You will undoubtedly get some strange looks when you crouch behind the dryers, screaming “duck and cover!” at your bewildered audience of Tide-slinging housekeepers and homemakers.

“Buildings probably have repurposed those shelters in the past few decades,” says Nancy Silvestri of New York City’s Emergency Management Department. “Spoiler alert,” says Schlegelmilch, “there is most likely no fallout shelter in the building.” At least not in the sense you might imagine. “Because you would just be dead from the initial blast.” Kind of a good news/bad news scenario, we suppose.Īs to whether these shelters “still work,” one first has to consider whether they “still exist.” Suppose that, rattled by Kim Jong-un’s latest rhetoric, or perhaps concerned at the prospect of leaky X-ray machines in your dentist’s office, you were lured by one of those old signs to seek shelter. “You wouldn’t really have to deal with fallout,” says Jeff Schlegelmilch, deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

'You would just be dead from the initial blast.” They’d have been superfluous under a genuine onslaught of commie megatons.

Fallout shelters were often spaces like concrete-walled basements that could be retrofitted with air filtration systems, intended to protect occupants from the radioactive byproducts of a modest nuclear detonation. The advent of thermonuclear warheads-high-yield hydrogen bombs much more powerful than those dropped on Japan during World War II-rendered them moot. Rolled out in the early 1960s by the now-defunct Office of Civil Defense, they were never as well-equipped or funded as originally envisioned, which, frankly, didn’t much matter. Truthfully, fallout shelters were never all they were cracked up to be. These are, at this point, antiques, vestiges of a more innocent time a time when we liked to cling to the notion that a nuclear attack was readily survivable, sort of like a tornado, but with more gamma rays and fewer flying cows. Q: Would a 1960s-era designated “Fallout Shelter” help me in a nuclear attack today?Ī: We’ve all seen those yellow and black signs, emblazoned with three triangles, announcing the presence nearby of a fallout shelter.

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