March 08, 2003
Fallout Shelters All The Rage...Again
"Business since 9/11 has been fantastic," said Walton McCarthy of Radius Engineering, a New Hampshire manufacturer of bomb and storm shelters that cost from $14,000 to $66,000, made from fiberglass to last 300 years.
Two years ago, McCarthy also won a U.S. patent for his $5,500 "life cell," an air purifying apparatus and communications system which can turn a ordinary living room into a fortress against biological weapons.
"As soon as the word dirty bomb came out, our phones started ringing," McCarthy said, adding that attitudes on the merits of fallout shelters changed particularly in the Washington area, which remains his firm's leading city.
Alex Coleman, director of information technology at the American Civil Defense Association based in Starke, Fla., said he's noted from inquiries and phone calls that interest in backyard shelters increases every time the government changes the threat level from yellow to orange. He said the association gets as many as 300 phone calls a week for information.
"Interest in fallout shelters is definitely on the increase," Coleman said.
It was not always that way. Only a decade ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, government agencies began dismantling the network of civil defense shelters around the country. Once familiar yellow-and-black signs signifying their designation as emergency shelters were stripped from buildings, and food stocks cities built up in underground sites were taken off shelves and distributed to the poor or discarded.
Signifying their descent into history, the Smithsonian museum in Washington installed one of the underground Cold War relics in 1994, after it was ripped out of the front yard of a suburban Fort Wayne, Ind., home. It's still on display alongside other amusing artifacts of by-gone American culture such as Hula Hoops, advertisements for the two-door Studebaker coup, zoot suits and poodle skirts.
Among those who fought the trend to discard backyard fallout shelters was Kevin Briggs, a father of eight, who spent more than $70,000 building a 21-foot-long bomb shelter capable of protecting 200 people some 7 feet under his Fairfax County, Va., home.
Briggs started construction in 1990 after a Pentagon posting gave him access to information on America's potential enemies and an incident when Russia's military went on alert after mistaking the launch of a Norwegian weather satellite for an attack on Moscow. A nuclear response was only avoided when Russian Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin told the Kremlin to wait.
When he started digging up his backyard, Briggs recalled there were skeptics. In spite of his investment, the shelter added no value to his house when he sold it and moved to the Denver area.
Briggs he feels vindicated today about his efforts to prepare his family, and said all families should plan for emergencies.
"I advocate strongly a new wave of sheltering for the United States," said Briggs, who operates a Web site www.usdpi.org to give advice to families considering the idea. "It's the most cost effective way to deal with both natural and man-made disasters.
It's still a requirement for all new houses built in Switzerland, and Briggs said the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington shows there are still dangers out there facing the country. The Cold War might have ended, but Briggs said nuclear-tipped missiles are still pointed at the United States, and terrorists could easily use biological terror weapons.
"I absolutely believe in the risks," he said. The shelters also can serve as useful storage areas or in-house exercise rooms until they are needed.
The interest in bomb shelters today hardly compares to the panic that prompted construction of more than 200,000 backyard bomb shelters in the 1950s
The heyday for bomb shelter construction in the United States was undoubtedly in the fearful 1950s when the cartoon character Bert the Turtle urged Americans to prepare for nuclear war, and Good Housekeeping advised its readers to suspend cooking and start digging. Kids learned "duck and cover" drills in their school rooms, and girls were taught how to stock shelters in their home economics classes. In 1954, the entire nation conducted a nuclear war drill, and experts estimated an actual nuclear exchange would kill 12 million.
Jitters from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 sent dads into their backyards with shovels once again, and Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, said shelters could save 90 percent of the nation during a nuclear attack. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists employed a nuclear war clock where the hands were dangerously close to midnight.
President Reagan sought to revive the civil defense program as part of his confrontation to bring down the Soviet Union by installing new intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Family foxholes once again gained favor.
A decade later, when the pendulum swung back, physician Jane Orient persuaded the state of Arizona to give her one of the bomb shelters it had decided to junk. She had it trucked to her office in Tucson, where it remains today.
As president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, Orient has been warning people in her newsletter for the last 18 years that they must be ready for the unexpected, but she said that it was only after 9/11 that Tucson residents found out their public civil defense system had been dismantled.
"What is unthinkable to us is not necessarily unthinkable to everyone," she said.
On the Net: www.tacda.org
www.oism.org/ddp
www.radius-defense.com
(Contact Lance Gay at gayl(at)shns.com or visit SHNS on the Web at http://www.shns.com.)
(via rense.com)
Posted by glenn at March 8, 2003 02:58 PM | TrackBack