![]() Street people had also made a home of at least one shelter among the stacks of old cots, mattresses, stretchers, and toilets. In 1974, twenty tons of whole-wheat crackers-fallout shelter rations baked in 1962-were removed from the streetcar tunnel shelter beneath Dupont Circle and sent to Bangladesh to feed victims of monsoon floods. But some found utility in the old shelter stock. shelters as a historical curiosity, reminding readers of the vintage crackers, portable toilets, water drums, and tins of rock candy moldering in basements across the city. The DCD had been recast as the Office Emergency Preparedness, and now dealt almost exclusively with preparing for natural disasters and crowd control for parades and demonstrations. īy the mid-1970s, civil defense was all but forgotten in D.C. ![]() “They only get concerned when things get tough.” Tough times seemed past with Détente, and the Federal government began phasing out funding for stocking shelters in the early 1970s. “The public has refused to become overly educated about civil defense during times of peace,” said one DCD official. ![]() As indicative of the decline in public awareness, a 90-second test of Washington air raid sirens in July of 1972 appeared “to make absolutely no difference to anyone.” The fears of a decade previous had faded. DCD abandoned its volunteer programs by the mid-1960s and by the 1970s, public apathy was pervasive. But enthusiasm for civil defense was on the wane. By the close of the 1960s, fallout shelter spaces for 46 million people were marked with the black and yellow signs in American cities. Sixty percent of the shelters were in cities with populations of more than 250,000 people. ![]() These structures could potentially house more than 131,000,000 people. As of April 1965, 151,000 structures had been identified in the national fallout shelter survey as meeting the minimum requirements for fallout shelter protection. In March of 1963, years before DCD’s fallout shelter efforts reached their apex, The Post already noted “diminishing public interests in the national civil defense program.” Nevertheless, fallout shelter establishment would continue in Washington and across the nation through the rest of the decade. Types of interior and exterior fallout shelter signs. ![]()
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