There were two bathrooms with three toilets, a urinal, two sinks and two decontamination showers. Other rooms were available to store food or provide simple medical care. There was a maintenance room with a diesel-powered electric generator, an air circulation system with heat and air conditioning, a well and pipes that connected to the city water and sewer systems. The hallway was designed with many right-angle turns to prevent gamma rays from reaching the interior. The main entrance is a sliding, heavy metal grate that leads to an underground concrete hallway to the main part of the facility.

The building is about 3,000 square feet, with an 18-inch-thick concrete roof and 15-inch-thick walls. “So, it wasn’t designed to survive a direct nuclear strike on Seattle.” “It’s a pretty minimal shelter, and it’s not actually a bomb shelter, it’s a fallout shelter,” Scott Williams of the Washington State Department of Transportation told KIRO-FM Radio in 2018. The shelter was dedicated on March 29, 1963. Once construction of the shelter began, contractors were given only 120 days to build it. The May 15, 1962, Seattle Times identified the structure as “the nation’s first fallout shelter to be built into a freeway.”ĭesigned by the Seattle engineering firm Anderson Bjornstad Kane and built by McDonald Construction of Seattle for $67,300, the shelter is located under southbound Interstate 5, at the north end of the Ravenna Bridge. It was expected to be the first of several fallout shelters across the U.S., but ended up being the only one built in the country.

In November 1962, only a month after the Cuban Missile Crisis, excavation of a shelter in Seattle began.

Where is the closest fallout shelter