“I saw the new house,” my wife told me. She was looking for houses near her work in Downey, CA and this one, in South Gate, CA, was only five minutes away by car as opposed to the hour plus she was having to commute to and from North Hollywood every day. It had everything we were looking for- three bedrooms, central heating and A/C, a gated backyard with lots of room for the dog to run around. After describing it, she added, “and it has a fallout shelter.”
Yes, the house came with a fallout shelter in the back yard. It was built in the 1960s when people were building them all over the country. Most of them had been removed or filled in decades ago, but this one was still there. I hadn’t seen the house or the shelter due to how far away it was. I was taking care of my daughter an hours’ drive away and my wife checked it out on her lunch break.
Sure, I wasn’t looking for a house with a fallout shelter. Even if I wanted one, we live approximately here-
If there ever is a nuclear war, where my house is now will be replaced by a very, very large smoking crater in the ground, rapidly filling with water. I have no idea why someone thought it would be a good idea to build a fallout shelter in the middle of one of the largest cities in North America, but there it was. I was excited to see it… and why not? What a conversation piece!
I was expecting something like this:
It would be perfect! A little place to get away from stuff. I could set it up as a little lounge, put a new mattress on the bunks, hang out in the hot summer and read a book or have a few drinks and relax. As a friend of mine said to me, “you can turn it into a mancave.”
Well, he was right about the cave part anyway. It’s totally useless as any sort of room. Water seeps in from the ground, so the walls are moldy and musty. There’s no electricity. The only access is by a rickety ladder which isn’t even bolted down. So, it’s a bit of a dismal and useless shelter, but it’s still a conversation piece. Here are some photos:
Here is the hatch to get into the shelter. Note that it is made of wood, a substance guaranteed to keep out all that nasty radiation and ash. At some point, someone tried to paint the wood and failed. As you can see, it’s also rotting. Next to it is a lime from our backyard lime tree- unfortunate because I don’t like limes, but we didn’t get the house for the tree. When you open the hatch, you see…
Yep, scary ladder down the scary hole. Not exactly a place I would want to head down quickly with my wife and daughter when the bombs start falling, but hey, it’s an emergency, right? We don’t need a comfortable way in as long as it’s… oh.
My amazing fallout shelter was a moldy, filthy concrete box about the size of a delivery van. Even though that wooden hatch is there to protect me from the toxic air and the cannibal mutants, I think I might take my chances on the surface. Let’s turn around and climb out…
There’s that horrible ladder. It’s a little slick and also rotting, but I somehow managed to haul my fat ass out of there without being bitten by any of the nasty things that probably live in there now. Note that it is also nearly pitch black in there with the only light coming from the hatch. I used the camera’s flash to compensate.
So… that’s my very own fallout shelter. We have no use for it, we can’t put anything in it that we don’t want covered in mold, we certainly don’t want to hang out in it and it is way in the back of the yard behind the garage, so even if we could put stuff there, it wouldn’t be especially convenient to access it.
I love my house, but the fallout shelter is really only good for telling people I have a fallout shelter. Any suggestions you have for a mold-covered electricity-free concrete bunker under my backyard, feel free to make them in the comments.