Monday, August 20, 2018

The Cold War and the Building of Fallout Shelters

As a reference librarian sometimes I get very interesting questions.  Recently I got a question where a patron wanted to know about a bomb shelter in the State House.  When I researched this question I found out that in 1961 President John F. Kennedy, worried about the threat of nuclear attack, created a program to determine where public community fallout shelters were located.  According to the podcast The Global Politico, on October 6, 1961 “President John F. Kennedy advised U.S. families to build bomb shelters as protection from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.”  Media outlets followed with stories about shelters and how to build them.  Shelters should be made with concrete blocks for a basement shelter, sand or gravel fill for an above ground shelter and both have waterproof plywood.  “Congress voted to appropriate $169 million to locate, mark and stock fallout shelters in existing public and private buildings.”

In order to become a fallout shelter a building had to meet certain criteria and then the Office of Civil defense would let it be marked as a fallout shelter.  WGBH reports the criteria for a building to be designated a fallout shelter as suitable if they met three criteria.  First was that they provided physical protection usually meaning they were fairly airtight with thick concrete walls:  “They had to have a protection factor of at least 40 which meant you would receive 1/40th the radiation inside the building than you would outside, unprotected.” The building also had to be built away from likely fallout therefore shelters were built in basements of schools, and in the middle floors of taller buildings.  The third requirement was that there had to be room for at least 50 people with 10 square feet of space per person.

Shelter sign at the Boston
Public Library
According to the blog Fallout Five Zero, on November 5, 1962 Governor John Volpe posted a shelter sign in front of the State House. Some unconventional places such as theaters, department stores and office buildings became shelters. The shelters were marked with a yellow and black sign which was designed by Robert Blakeley, a US Army Corps of Engineers employee.  The Macy’s in downtown Boston and the central branch of the Boston Public Library still have shelter signs on their buildings.

Bomb shelters and fallout shelters are two different entities and the terms are frequently confused with each other.  A bomb shelter is designed to protect people from the physical force of a bomb, while a fallout shelter is supposed to protect one from the radioactive particles in the air after the bomb drops.  The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency bunker in Framingham is designed to protect people against a severe bomb blast making it an example of a bomb blast.

 As a result of the nuclear threat in the 1960s’, people were building shelters in their own backyards. The Boston Globe Magazine published an article on December 12, 1999 about a family in Tewksbury that has a bomb shelter in their backyard.  Several families got together to build a 22 by 38 foot shelter space after President Kennedy, responding to the Berlin crisis gave a speech in the summer of 1961 telling citizens to build fallout shelters.  The project started out amicably with each family chipping in $600. Then disagreements started with what foods to stock.  Then there was a discussion about what to do if neighbors wanted to break into the fallout shelter during a nuclear attack.  One neighbor, who participated in the building of the shelter said to shoot them which made another participant want to scrap the whole project.  The shelter is still there because it is hard to remove something that is built out of concrete and steel. There could be hundreds or more of these backyard shelters in backyards all over Massachusetts and the country unbeknownst to current residents.

Resources for Further Reading and Research

Naomi Allen
Reference Librarian

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