Noted: The DIY Fallout Shelter

Interesting article. Thank you.

This was a very interesting time in history. So many good movies were made about this era including The Atomic Cafe and Blast From The Past. Thanks for the article, Alison!

Pretty crazy the Atomic Age. We have this vinyl at our radio station of old "how to build your own" shelter, and how to prepare. Pretty interesting to play on the air!

Interesting and hard to believe that we had such a threat. Our modern day threat are our nuclear reactors. Sounds like a great book!

Wow. I wonder what we will be looking back on from this time decades from now..

Fascinating stuff! It was just such a bomb shelter, stocked with canned goods, that helped save the lives of the father and son in The Road. And I just found a 1950s Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday supplement entirely devoted to What to Do When A-Bombs Fall. In addition to building a bomb shelter, it also reassured readers that it's a good idea to light up a cigarette after an attack "to steady your nerves."

i've always wanted to see one of these in person. very much a sign of the times.

I have never seen a bomb shelter.

lol yea lighting a cigarette after an attack sounds like good advice, as long as you can multitask. I forget what movie or show it was but a guy tells the girl "oh it's the end of the world go to the bomb shelter with me".... i wish i could remember the name of it. :P

I love the extreme coupon program too...very amazed at the amount of effort that goes into that exercise...like a full time job! I grew up in the 60s and so remember the bomb shelters, the air raid siren tests... thanks for the interesting article!

Wow...I've never seen one in person but would love the chance!

Interesting. Reminds me of "Blast from the Past" :)

Effin sad is what it is.

Taking DIY to a whole new level.

very interesting, thanks for sharing :)

Underground house! Interesting!

thank you callmejasper for giving away the ending of The Road.

A loaded topic ~ its history is our present and still our future ~ New books like Bomboozled may help to change our involvement. There is a huge lack of activism in some pretty important issues these days. We've created a lot of small worries over the years and let untrustworthy people handle the big ones. I've been Bamboozled !

Awesome article, it reminds me Who is really in charge. When God comes back and the world ends, I will not be eating canned anything. I will have fudge! Lots of choc and peanut butter fudge. :)

Love it! I'm almost inspired to go eat a vegan-version Spam sandwich, canned veggies and watch Blast from the Past.

I love this article, so interesting! It would be a very nice book to read, if someone compiled and took photographs of all those shelters that people built. The idea's are endless (and expensive), but great never the less!

Great article! Though a fallout shelter may not be practical, it certainly can't hurt to be prepared for emergencies! *checks her bug-out bag and crisis stockpiles*

Great article, photos, perfect! Love learning about this!

those pictures are amazing!!

wow, what an uplifting article.

I grew up in a home with a "bomb shelter". Not being the most prepared family, we didn't supply it with food or water but it did have a sink and toilet. We went there during tornado warnings and to smoke cigarettes on the sly. The current home owner's son uses the shelter for band practice.

I may be paranoid. I think those shelter are very practical and cute. LOL.

Thanks for the interesting article !

my grandmother grew up during the depression. she stockpiled so many cans for so long that they became bloated with botulism. she refused to allow anyone to throw any of them away. my craft room would function well as a fall out shelter. i'm quite sure if the roof fell in it would still be supported by the mass of craft supplies and pillar high stacks of fabric :)

This was, unfortunately, a part of my everyday childhood-along with air-raid, duck-and-cover drills in elementary school. I know of only one family that actually had a bomb shelter. They were expensive to build. A luxury really. If you want to check out a worst-case-scenerio of cold war living, watch the episode of the old Twilight Zone tv show called "The Shelter". It will give you something to think about.

i love Blast from the Past (well, most of the movie). this whole time period is very interesting to me. i guess that's obvious. i will have to get that book.

Great article and pictures, thanx

I've always found the notion of bunkers quite fascinating especially a lot of the information that was disseminated that today looks quite laughable was taken seriously then! Apparently our town hall has a bunker under it I've always wanted to know if its true.

it's better to hide yourself under the ground ;-)

Very interesting article. I can remember as a child when we all worried about the need for bomb shelters. We now need shelters to protect us from storms.

You've gotta love that illustration of Dad looking up at the mushroom cloud, Mom making the bed, and their little son calmly reading a book.

I've secretly always wanted my own bomb shelter house. Okay, not so secretly. I want one. :D

I have always kept a "live for today" attitude. I think growing up in the 60's with "duck and cover" and he constant threat of nuclear war gave my generation a fatalistic view. Live for today for tomorrow we may die! Not exactly cheery, but fun all the same!!! Thanks for this article.

As a Canadian, the Cold War had a different look and feel. We would be caught in the cross-fire should either the country geographically above or below us decide to "push the button". My Mom grew-up in the '50s and practiced hiding under her desk during air raid drills. I grew-up in the '70s, and although we didn't hide under our desks, we did have an annual test of the air raid siren that stood guard on our school ground. That siren was not removed until the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fascinating subject. Thank you for sharing.

Cool. I remember the air raid drills in the hall at school. The classroom blinds were pulled down and the doors closed. Even then, I never understood how that was going to save us. Nice article.

It's hard to believe that a whole new generation has grown up WITHOUT debates about what you'd do during the 4 minute warning & knowing that all we had to do in the event of a nuclear attack was to live under the kitchen table for a fortnight! It was actually a very real possibility throughout my childhood & I don't think that realistically anyone really believed we'd survive... I don't know how many people would really want to face the aftermath of a nuclear war. Looks like a fascinating book!

Well, maybe not a bomb shelter, per se, but one would have come in handy in some parts of the country in the last couple of weeks. Having been recently flattened by all the tornados there, I bet lots of people in the Midwest, etc., would have been totally thrilled if grandpa had built one under their house 50 years ago. I guess the modern bomb shelter would be a sort of "Panic Room" version of Auntie Em's Root Cellar from the wizard of Oz.

A couple of years ago friends of mine in London were advised to keep a room ready for a bio/gas hazard; basically lots of duct tape and heavy plastic to seal the windows, vents, and cracks. The whole end-of-the-world thing makes most of us laugh, but the the London "tubes" were used as bomb shelters all throughout WW2, with great success.

Fascinating!

Interesting article, makes me want to design my own fallout shelter!

Huh. Cool. I want an underground house! I might have to read more about all this.

Amazing!

I remember my parent's looking at plans for an underground house in the 70's.I almost forgot about that. Thanks.

Along with the fallout shelter there seemed to be a craze to build everything on the patio out of concrete. My grandfather was the king of this phenom, ugly--the bbq, the garden wall, all plain block concrete & always, DIY. :-) Great share! thanks, dahlila

I remember drills in school when we had to get under our desks. Hindsight makes that almost laughable.

Great article! Thanks for the post. Photos are awesome as well. It's actually pretty scary when you think about the possibility of a nuclear weapon hitting the home front. I've heard so many recent convo's amongst people talking about underground shelters in the event that some devestating disaster happens such as this. They claim that we should all be piling up on canned goods and foods that have a shelf life of lasting forever. This might be the case, but in the world can afford any extras with everything being so expensive....

Reminds me of the old Steve Goodman song, "Watching Joey Glow" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpfkDEBno1M My folks had plans for a shelter that never got built and stockpiled can goods that we eventually ate. We did the duck and cover drills at school - fun times, fun times.

Excellent article! I've seen that show, it is a compulsion, to prepare, or over prepare, for the unknown. Great tie in with the fallout shelter movement. There's also the popularity of apocalyptic fiction - zombies, shows like The Colony, The Walking Dead, books like The Stand - we are obsessed with the end of the world - I admit it, I love those books and movies. Although maybe we should start building tornado shelters. Oh, and my fallout shelter better have wifi.

I wish I had one in the back yard to get in during tornadoes. I remember taking a six week course in the 8th grade on how to protect your family in the event of nuclear war, build your own shelter, etc. My mother was appalled that 8th graders were even thinking about such things. A family we knew built a shelter. And they bought a gun for everyone in the family, including the six year old, so they could defend it.

great article! love it!

I would love to have an echo bomb shelter, too cool!

super interesting! thanks!

This brings back memories of when we had the bomb drills at school, I had forgotten all about those!

Wow, can you imagine living in that last picture? Although the BBQ in there would make me worry about carbon monoxide!

When my mom was a kid in the 50s, the schools had bomb drills. She said all the kids would get under their desk with their paper sunglasses and wait for the all clear. O sure...that would really help save them.

I loved this article! Reminds me of that film with Alicia Silverstone? Blast from the past!

I got my Bomb Shealter. Its called my Basement :)

I totally remember those bomb shelters from when I was 8 years old or so. I thought they were the absolute coolest thing and we begged my father to build one. Of course he thought we were crazy. Then there was the question of who would you let in if the bomb fell and you had to move in. Where would our vest friends go? What were people thinking? What would you do after the first week or so?

Oh, these are fascinating! I know someone who bought a house with one. I only ventured down there once due to the rickety steps, but it has two sets of bunk beds (thank goodness the mattresses were long gone--ew!) and a fresh air crank. The owner plans to turn it into a wine cellar, so in the case of nuclear fallout, I suppose the drinks will be top notch should we need to take shelter! :) I also noticed it was around 20 degrees cooler down there than up top. I could really go for that for summer sleeping.

yeah, my parents bought into this idea also. in their basement and i am sure t is still there today if you go to Vance St and into the basement. they had food and water, etc and later turned it into storage. well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. and they were concerned for their family, but what about othwers. it would have been a neighborhood war to say the least.

I love this kind of stuff and the things that it has inspired since then. If you are not familiar with the video game "Fallout" I urge you to check out Youtube for videos. It takes this concept of living under ground during a nuclear war and runs with it. The commercials and videos for the games are super Campy as well as a little disturbing at times!

Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

Great article!

Great story, love that underground house!

I'm on the fence about all this! :)

Now instead of air raid drills our children practice lock-down drills in case someone is in the school with a gun. The nuclear threat almost seems less real than the crazy person with a gun threat.

So camp and kitch! Can you imagine our world if we had needed to use these?

hehe can you imagine being in one of those cramped little shelters for years on end...eek!

Years on end? Yeeps! First time someone got the trots from a bad can of something, I'd be sucking nuked air from the seams of the doorway, clawing my way out.

enjOyed this article°°° ...working on mine this summer...zombie invasion proofing aNd water filtration...

I wonder how many of these are still in existence...

I have seen a program on this very thing. I can't remember if it was on the history or discovery channel but very much like. This time around it is 2012, not nuclear attacks. The shelters are several stories deep into the earth and very elaborate. People really believe that the world is going to end next year on 12/21/12. The guy who builds these things for people stated that he couldn't tell anyone where he had built them or he would be rubbed out. wow, really scary stuff.

In the aftermath of this spring’s terrifying tornado season, I wonder if some of these designs might be repurposed. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there was a new shelter building boom in the centeral and southern states to protect people from the weather!

Great slice of history! So cute and naive. Ever seen 'The Road"? I don't think you would want to live after a nuclear war.

I remember growing up with a tin of crackers in our basement with a nuclear fallout symbol on it. Thank God it never became a reality. Well done Alison-you deliver very interesting articles!