The idea, he explained, was that any surviving government officials would enter through this blast door, but once inside the facility, they would have shower off any radioactive dust that had collected on them before entering the shelter. Running down the avenue / See how the sun shines brightly. Once it slammed shut? “You'd have to make it in before the blast door closed,” Rowley said. Three latches crossed the door’s inside, but its exterior was smooth: There is no door handle or knob, designed to withstand a barrage of radiation and debris. For that, Rowley led me through the narrow hallway, passing by what used to be dormitories for the personnel stationed here, until we reached a huge iron door, accessible from the roof at the top of the red-rock hill. Joseph Flaherty The flight of stairs where I entered the building is not the original entrance to the shelter. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the practices of Civil Defense had transformed into modern-day emergency management, more attuned to dealing with floods and hurricanes than ICBMs and fallout borne on a mushroom cloud. The fallout shelter still has old Civil Defense supplies: a pair of Geiger counters, an information pamphlet, and cans of water, all with the C.D. However, in a new twist for the atomic age, Civil Defense educational materials and supplies were meant to educate the public on nuclear attack on American soil from the Soviet Union. at a barricade and strolled purposefully around the base.ĭuring the Cold War, the Office of Civil Defense assumed many of the responsibilities of its predecessor agency that marshaled resolve and resources during World War II. On the day I visited, National Guardsmen checked my I.D. It’s also an impressive site: It's cut into red sandstone into a hill on Papago Park Military Reservation. A relic from the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy, the bunker was built in 1956, and still has a slightly eerie Cold War aesthetic to the narrow hallways and beige paint on the walls. Joseph Flaherty Needless to say, the facility was built to survive the bomb. We have our water, so we can survive off utilities. He ticked off a dizzying list of the fallout shelter’s advantages: “We're on high ground. Robert Rowley, the director of emergency management for the county, noted, “Whoever decided this as a location back in the ’50s picked a really good spot.”Ī former deputy sheriff of Monterey, California, Rowley wore glasses and a crisp button-down shirt. “Welcome to the dungeon,” an assistant told me with a grin as we walked down a flight of stairs, headed underneath the mountain. But if missiles were in the air - North Korea just launched a trio the other day - and Phoenix was on the shortlist for nuclear annihilation, you could only hope to be inside the Maricopa County Emergency Management Office: a Cold War-era fallout shelter. Was this how it all ends: madman theory playing out in reality, with the entire world held hostage? Threats of “fire and fury” and an imminent plan to strike the waters of Guam had done the impossible, overloading my general anxiety to leave me numb, unable to comprehend if what I was witnessing was real. The week before, I’d watched a geopolitical back-and-forth that flirted in a shockingly casual way with nuclear annihilation. It's stopped raining, everybody's in the lane / And don't you know, it's a beautiful new day. All I could think about was a nuclear missile dropping out of the blue Arizona sky. But because of the context of my trip, the lyrics were unsettling. Ordinarily, the song felt upbeat: Sun is shining in the sky / There ain’t a cloud in sight.
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