Bomb Shelters Fall Out of Favor, But Some Live on as Wine Cellars

It has no food. The electricity is shot. And it floods something awful.

But even so, insists one Point Loma woman, the 28-year-old concrete bunker sprawling beneath her back yard is the only thing that stands between her family and nuclear destruction.

“No, it’s not fixed up,” said the woman, who refused to give her name. “I would have to have a warning before I got into it.” But, in case of a nuclear assault by the Soviet Union, she said, “Sure I would use it. And I think it would work.”

Decades after the pangs of the “Red Scare” and the polemics of Minnesota Sen. Joe McCarthy, one icy remnant of the post-World War II Cold War remains.

Almost 30 years later, the bomb shelter lives on.

“My husband built ours in 1960,’ the woman said of her bedroom-sized bomb shelter, which is buried 19 feet below the surface of her yard. “At the time, it was critical. I don’t know about now, because everything has calmed down.

“I haven’t kept it up. The electricity isn’t working. And it flooded--I think it was a foot--last year while I was watering the lawn. But I still think it’s good for the United States. They have them all over Switzerland, and there are some in Austria, where I’m from. I remember some being built in the United States a few years ago, but I don’t know anybody around here with one.”

Nonetheless, she is not alone.

“There are quite a few around the Rancho Santa Fe area,” said John McChristy, a real estate broker with Rancho Santa Fe Acreage & Homes. “I’ve seen some myself. I would say there are at least 20. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. But I would bet on 10.

“There are a lot of people who call them other things, like storage rooms, but I’m sure that many of them can be used as or converted into bomb shelters.”

“Yes, you still have some people out there who have them,” said Steve Danon, an operations officer for the county Office of Disaster Preparedness. “But, unless they are far away from the point of detonation, they don’t do much good.”

Converted Into Wine Cellars

Although many remain, most bomb shelters that once were installed in the back yards of private homes and the basements of area businesses have vanished.

“A lot of people have filled them in with sand or are using them for wine cellars now,” Danon said. “During the ‘60s and ‘50s, they were just part of that era--the Cold War. U.S.-Soviet relations weren’t that good. There was the Cuban missile crisis. And people probably figured that it would shield them in the event of an atomic attack.

“After a while, tensions relaxed and people began thinking less and less about an atomic war. It just sort of faded out,” Danon said.

Even as personal bomb shelters lost their popularity, support has waned for the public shelters that the government funded for many years.

The shelters, situated in restaurant basements, bank vaults, school gyms and the cellars of major department stores, were a primary safeguard. Fallout shelters were designed to shield citizens from radiation from nuclear bombs; blast shelters were to protect them from the impact of the explosion.

The nation’s shelters, regularly stocked with foodstuffs, toiletries and medical kits, were intended to save 90% of the U.S. population in event of a nuclear war.

Nowadays, they are idle and unstocked shells, at best. And, at worst, some of the 140 shelters in San Diego County are rancid trash heaps.

“The basements of May Co. and San Diego State University had large stockpiles of supplies,” Danon said. “Their basements had been used as blast shelters before the program went obsolete. The supplies went to waste.

“The last we got physically involved in cleaning them out was at the May Co. in Mission Valley a couple of years ago. The people at May Co. decided they wanted to use their basement as a sales area, and so we had to go down there and clean the shelter out. They had a couple of hundred medical kits and other supplies.

“I heard that, when San Diego State cleaned out their basements, they had truckloads of old crackers, candy and water and medical supplies. We didn’t have the resources to help, but they threw it all away. It was rotten; that’s what we would have told them to do, anyway.”

Evacuation Plan Replaces Shelters

The shelter program has been replaced by an evacuation plan known as the emergency management planning program.

“Here, the emergency management planning program calls for the relocation of San Diegans to the eastern part of the county,” Danon said. “They would be moved to the desert. But that wouldn’t work either, because there’s no way you could evacuate that many people that fast.”

He said the federal government is now looking at other ways to shield people from nuclear attack.

For nearly a decade, from 1962 to 1970, the federal government gave $17.3 million to local agencies to work on the shelter program.

“It really began to become a widely spread and well-funded program during the mid-’60s,” said Danon, whose office is responsible for public relief efforts if a nuclear disaster occurs. The government was spending millions to prepare for war. They were stockpiling the shelters with all the essentials for life.

“But then, Soviet-U.S. relations improved, and people began to look at the money spent on the program, and it died,” Danon said.

It was a death that was accelerated by the birth of the nuclear bomb, he said.

“It’s a combination of the improved relations and the evolution from atomic weapons to thermonuclear weapons,” he said, “From kilotons to megatons, where we are now talking about millions of tons of TNT. A blast shelter or a fallout shelter would be disintegrated in seconds, so they don’t do a whole lot of good.”

The Point Loma woman understands this.

The shelter “wouldn’t withstand a direct hit,” she said. “Beside, I don’t think I would want to live underground for six weeks. There would be nothing to come up to.”

However, she said she would still stockpile the bunker if the threat of a nuclear war arose.

“I think that, if you are far away enough from the radiation, you can start over again,” she said. “I would want my children to use the shelter. They are young; I have lived my life.”