materials to use in a shelter in a nuclear fallout

Inside, it’s a multi-story structure with “a kitchen, bathrooms, showers, a 12,000-gallon water tank (and) central air conditioning,” per WFAE, and was last put up for sale in 2003.ĭecades after the Cold War winded down, even the occasional homebuyer will still find a shelter. Less than an hour outside of Charlotte, that facility has “60,000 square feet of space encased in 2,100 tons of steel and 10,000 cubic yards of concrete,” WFAE reported previously. In November 1962, T he Charlotte Observer reported that its own building was equipped as a fallout shelter, The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission notes.Īnd in 1963, a shelter was constructed underneath WBT’s radio station as part of the Emergency Broadcasting System, per NPR.īusinesses invested in bunkers, too, including AT&T, who opened a facility in Stanfield in 1967. Many fallout shelters in the Charlotte area were built during the 1960s as concerns about a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union continued.

The idea was that even during an attack, the president would still be able to address the nation. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration created the Emergency Broadcasting System, which at the time included bunkers at radio stations throughout the country, NPR reported. And families, businesses, and government agencies continued to see fallout shelters as useful. “Decidedly suburban, heteronormative, and middle class in nature, this visual of white American families carefully lining shelter shelves with canned goods or taking their children by the hand as they walked toward their underground refuges broadcast a clear government-sanctioned message: A family that is together, well organized and ready could survive the next war,” the Smithsonian states.Īs the Cold War stretched, so did fear of a potential nuclear attack.

The department distributed “nearly half a billion” pamphlets to the American people that included depictions of shelters. government launched the Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1951.

Materials to use in a shelter in a nuclear fallout