Fallout shelter building supplies
While Howey was tiring of the attention, there was clearly public interest in the artifact, and he wondered if perhaps the Smithsonian would want it for its collection.Īt the time, Bird was on the lookout for objects that would tell interesting stories about science in American life. He had removed some trees and shrubs that had hid the shelter’s access point and a few ventilation pipes for years, and, as a result, was fielding more and more questions from curious passers-by. Tim Howey, then-owner of the Fort Wayne home, had written a letter to the museum. Larry Bird, a curator in the division of political history at the National Museum of American History, first heard about the Cold War relic in 1991. Because it had not been sufficiently anchored, with the area’s water table in mind, it had crept back up until it finally poked through the surface. A few years later, in 1961, there was reportedly more commotion, when, at about the time of the Berlin Crisis, the Andersons had the shelter reinterred. Neighbors watched as a crane lowered the shelter, resembling a septic tank, into a pit. In 1955, the family of three purchased a steel fallout shelter, complete with four drop-down beds, a chemical pit toilet and a hand cranked air exchanger for refreshing their air supply, and had it installed 15 feet below their front lawn for a total of $1,800.
The Andersons of Fort Wayne, Indiana, were preparing for nuclear fallout even before the government disseminated this booklet, which includes building plans for five basic shelters. The Family Fallout Shelter (1959), published by the United States Office of Civil and Defense mobilization These weapons create a new threat-radioactive fallout that can spread death anywhere.
But we know that forces hostile to us possess weapons that could destroy us if we were unready. We do not know whether there will be war.