“At best, they are ignored, at worst, they’re misleading and are going to cost people’s lives.” “I love seeing the signs, but, as a disaster planner, they have to come down,” he said. The city’s removal appeared somewhat haphazard: on one Brooklyn street, a sign on a school photographed by Reuters this month was subsequently removed, while a second school a few blocks away still had its sign attached, albeit with a screw missing.Īs a history buff, Jeff Schlegelmilch is fond enough of the signs that he stuck a replica on his office door at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, where he is deputy director. Although the agency does not maintain lists of the old shelter locations, she added, “as a part of an ongoing planning effort, the agency is conducting research to retrieve Office of Civilian Defense records.” “FEMA does not have a position regarding the signs,” Jenny Burke, a FEMA spokeswoman, wrote in an email on Tuesday. Maintenance of the shelter system, which once entailed federal funding to stock shelters with food and water, ended decades ago.īut FEMA said it did not mind anyway.
In the aftermath of a nearby nuclear explosion, any survivors counting on the signs to lead them to safety from radioactive fallout after needlessly dashing outside would likely find themselves rattling locked doors or perhaps breaking into what is now a building’s laundry room or bike-storage area. But should catastrophe ever strike, the signs, which still linger in their thousands, would be best ignored, city officials and disaster preparedness experts say.
Although the Cold War era has long ended, North Korea continues working to develop nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting the United States amid bellicose rhetoric from Washington and Pyongyang.Ī nuclear explosion is now seen as even less likely than during the Cold War. While some New Yorkers may barely notice them today, to others they can be an uneasy reminder that the threat may have altered and diminished, but it has not vanished. The signs, with their simple design of three joined triangles inside a circle, became an emblem of the era. Kennedy to create the shelter program in 1961 in cities across the nation.
The small metal signs are a remnant of the anxieties over the nuclear arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, which prompted U.S.
38 in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., December 7, 2017. A yellow nuclear fallout shelter sign is seen hung over the entrance to P.S.
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