8/25/2023 0 Comments Early fallout shelter signs![]() One such place is the basement of the original Chas. More: She's working to plant 200 trees along the Susquehanna Trail to honor veterans A time capsule I do not know of any formal program to clean out” those supplies. Mike Shanabrook, a York City office of emergency planning specialist, said, “I know some facilities still have Civil Defense supplies. So where have all the CD fallout shelters gone? Another 392 buildings in York had been identified as potential fallout shelters (but not designated as such) for an additional 131,720 people.The article did not explain the major difference between the number of people who could fit in a shelter and the amount of food and water for them.Water was stockpiled in barrels for 25,000 people.There was enough food in the shelter (probably the well-known shelter crackers) for 18,427 people.That figure was 14,000 more than the number of people living in the city at that time.The shelters could accommodate 69,089 people.134 Licensed Public Fallout Shelters in the City of York.It is an intriguing look at the York that was: The article gives an inventory of Civil Defense fallout shelters compiled from the 1960 census. 19, 1968 York Gazette & Daily, a predecessor publication of the York Daily Record. In the Civil Defense file at the York County History Center Library and Archives is a newspaper clipping from the Feb. As the namesake of the motivating World War II “York Plan” – “Do what you can with what you have” – it is possible the community could have been a nuclear target. York, at the time, was an industrial hub. Banks and buildings with sturdy basements were usually so marked. The entrance above ground The radio communications room A mural made to look like a window in the underground living area The kitchen The recreation room The recreation room in the 1960s.You could walk through downtown York and see many buildings marked with signs indicating the structure was a Civil Defense shelter in case of nuclear attack. Below are photos of the shelter taken recently by staff of the Tennessee Historical Commission. He sold the station in 1962 but remained chairman of its parent company until his death in 1969. The shelter, along with Wooten’s 1939 house, are now surrounded by a modern housing development in Whitehaven.īorn in Mississippi, Wooten operated WREC radio from The Peabody hotel in the 1920s, expanding to television and putting WREG Channel 3 on the air in Memphis in 1956. In addition to architect-designed living areas with pool tables, bunk beds and a large kitchen with windows painted to look like the outside world, the structure originally contained some post-apocalyptic touches - like a refrigerated morgue, radio communications room, decontamination showers, metal blast doors, a hidden escape hatch and steel bars to keep people from getting in. A postcard shows the shelter’s original appearance. Wooten engineered the concrete blast shelter to comfortably house up to 65 people for 31 days if a nuclear bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb was dropped eight miles away, about the distance between Wooten’s home and downtown Memphis.Īt 5,600 square feet, it’s one of the larger private fallout shelters ever built and was called the “best engineered, most elaborate private shelter” in the nation by a federal official at the time. Hoyt Wooten designed and built the shelter under the ground next to his home between 19, a time when Americans feared a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. A Cold War-era fallout shelter built in Whitehaven by the founder of WREG is being added to the National Register of Historic Places after a vote by the state’s historic commission. (photo from University of Memphis special collections) Hoyt Wooten designed and built the fallout shelter behind his home in 1963. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.
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