Improvised Basement Fallout Shelter from The Late 1960s



In 1967, the US Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense published a 28-page pamphlet on how to harden your home’s basement to help survive against radiation and fallout from a nuclear blast.

Included is a chapter on "improvised" shelters - for those unlucky souls who hadn’t completed their own personal bomb shelter:

If a workbench is not available, you can improvise a somewhat larger shelter area by using furniture, doors, dressers, or other materials.

Remove doors from their hinges and place them over supports in the corner of your basement having the best protection. The supports for the table can be chests of drawers or anything that can take a heavy load. Use two or three doors over each support for this shelter to provide sufficient strength to carry the heavy loads placed on them.

Place bricks, concrete blocks, earth- or sand-filled drawers, books, a collapsible swimming pool filled with water, etc., over the doors to provide an overhead shield. Use anything with weight that can be moved. The heavier the material, the more the protection.

Yup: your kid’s ghetto pool (as my wife calls it) could double as a fallout shelter! Link (towards the bottom) - Thanks Derek!


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Posted on March 20, 2008 at 5:54 am by Alex
Category: Weapons & War



6 Comments to "Improvised Basement Fallout Shelter from The Late 1960s"

  • bum
    March 20th, 2008 at 8:01 am

    “Leave my elevator alone!”

  • Shiver
    March 20th, 2008 at 9:28 am

    Actually, water is incredibly good at stopping radiation….so maybe its not such a bad idea ;P

  • Scotchdrnkr
    March 20th, 2008 at 11:21 am

    Amazing what they thought would work back then isn’t it.
    Ignorance is bliss!

  • redphone
    March 20th, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    These guides usually suggest placing your food supply on top as well. I can see how it creates a good shield of course, but shouldn’t we protecting our food supply within the shelter instead of using it as our protective layer?

    God help anyone with a dog too, eh.

  • Allison
    March 20th, 2008 at 7:13 pm

    Wow, it’s weird to see this picture again. My mom has the booklet this came from at home (as well as several others.) There is a whole sub culture of people who collect these pamphlets and fallout kits. Some of the rarest fallout kits are the ones that have a portable toilet (with bag for easy disposal) included.

    There are all kinds of hilarious things (read “disturbing”) about these things. What people were told to do!

    I can’t imagine spending years of my life with my family under a kiddie pool waiting for the environment to be safe again.

  • Douglas2
    March 20th, 2008 at 9:25 pm

    I came across the car-over-trench expedient shelter design many years ago. Perhaps a decade later I started to wonder if the purpose behind these lighweight constructions with lots of dirt on top and unshored-trench type “expedient” shelters was to save the survivors from proper shelters from the need to be gravediggers for the non-survivors

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