"Now, we have to look at the whole picture," said Spino, noting air-raid test sirens blew at 6 p.m. In the 1960s, the brick shelter would have had little more than benches on a dirt floor. Now the room houses boilers for Camden City's tallest building. Through a series of metal doors, red paint peeling from each one, the crumbling fallout shelter symbol marks the building's safe room.
There, a winding staircase leads to to a labyrinth of rooms more than 40 feet underground. Survival would have been doubtful even in a shelter two-and-a-half stories beneath Camden's City Hall. It only protects you from radiation," he said. "Everyone in a fallout shelter would have been killed. Everything within a mile of the target area would be "vaporized to nothing."Īnother three to four miles around the blast site would be burning from the explosion's intense heat. "People wanted a sense of where to go to maybe survive," said James Heinzen, a Russian history professor at Rowan University.Ī fallout shelter would have been of little use to many South Jerseyans if nuclear weapons struck Philadelphia, Heinzen said. The elementary students huddled in a lower level of the building, she remembered. Poole remembers duck-and-cover drills and fallout shelter evacuations at Mantua's J. "In the 1960s, we had to cover the female next to us and sacrifice ourselves," he said, laughing off the protocol of his elementary school days. He was a child when the fear of nuclear war plagued the U.S.
Most public fallout shelters have been forgotten since the height of the Cold War a half-century ago.ĭecades after the nuclear bomb threat subsided, shelters were renovated to office spaces and storage areas.Ĭamden County dropped fallout shelters from its emergency plans years ago, according to Sam Spino, county emergency management coordinator. On the other side was the courthouse's original jail cell, now a storage room for tax maps and building plans.īut the cell served another purpose decades ago - as a potential haven from nuclear fallout in the Cold War era. Heather Poole led the way down the main stairwell of Gloucester County's Old Courthouse to a long, underground hallway.Īt the end, the county deputy clerk pried open two sets of heavy metal doors.
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