Beyond the sphinxes of the Salt Lake Masonic Temple’s stone steps — through the giant wooden doors and amid the hushed halls and secretive sanctuaries — is a fallout shelter. Salt Lake City had at least four — the Masonic temple, the Utah Capitol, the Pioneer Memorial Museum and the YWCA. Now, they’re hidden relics.
"This building would have come down like a house of cards," said Larry Fairclough, the Masonic society’s secretary, walking into a high-ceilinged lounge with tall windows that an atomic blast could have shattered.
Fairclough was unsure what part of the Masonic building would act as a shelter, but he figures it might have been the Colonial Room or Egyptian Room, a pair of romantically decorated sanctuaries for society meetings, which are windowless and built with concrete roofs and floors on a steel frame.
The buildings designated as community fallout shelters during the 1960s were never meant as salvation from the explosion, only sanctuary from the ensuing radiation.
These paranoia-fueled pledges to survive the apocalypse have quietly faded into the background of everyday life.
Fairclough is old enough to remember the duck-and-cover drills in elementary school. They didn’t make him feel safe; quite the opposite.
"They were quite frightening. Girls would cry. By the time I reached fifth grade, I decided that if the bomb ever came," Fairclough said, spreading his arms, "I would just stand up and face it."
Still, the federal government was intent on providing some measure of security.
In 1961, Utah architects and engineers, under the direction of the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers, began surveying buildings and mines that could protect people from nuclear fallout. As part of a nationwide program to survive nuclear holocaust, more than 300 cities and towns in the state requested to be a part of the survey — and, by the 1970s, there were enough public shelters to house Utah’s entire population, according to an emergency-services director quoted in a 1977 Salt Lake Tribune article.
It was common for most of the buildings that met the surveyors’ criteria to be downtown, said David Monteyne, author of "Fallout Shelter: Designing for Civil Defense in the Cold War." The problem was, downtowns were also often considered primary targets of nuclear attacks.
To read the rest of the article by Michael McFall in The Salt Lake Tribune, visit: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58254138-78/fallout-amp-shelter-shelters.html.csp
Image courtesy Francisco Kjolseth, The Salt Lake Tribune