This is Abo Elementary School, in Artesia, New Mexico. It’s also a nuclear shelter.

I remember seeing black and yellow fallout shelter signs in my own public school buildings growing up in the 2000’s and early 2010’s. Generally, the shelters these referred to were a concrete room in a larger building that had long since been converted to generic storage, particularly after federal civil defense funding dried up in the 1970s.¹

Abo took things a little bit more seriously than most schools.  The building in this picture is not Abo Elementary School.  This is just the entrance to the school: the school itself is hidden underground to protect it against fallout or a nuclear blast wave.  The concrete roof also served as a basketball court.  According to a Time magazine article about the school,² Abo Elementary included two wells for emergency drinking water (and for air conditioning in normal circumstances), 14 days of food supply, underground phone lines and radio equipment, provisions for fire fighting and garbage disposal, and even a morgue.  Wikipedia adds air-filtration systems, an emergency power-generation system, and decontamination systems to the list, sourced from a 2001 book on fallout shelters in general.

Abo had its design by 1960; construction completed in 1962.  It was designed for 540 students, and had capacity for over 2,000 residents in case of an emergency.  The town’s population was over six times bigger – nearly 12,000 residents – and some students at the school later expressed being afraid that their parents wouldn’t be able to make it to the shelter in the event of a real nuclear attack.  But the builders of the school wanted to reassure kids, not scare them.  The Time article quotes the then-president of Artesia’s Board of Education, Mrs. C. P. Bunch:

“These shelters have an important psychological value,” says Mrs. Bunch. “We must build up the will to resist. America’s morale will go down if we feel helpless. Let’s teach our children that we can protect ourselves and survive.”

Abo was used until 1995, when it was replaced with a school next door (Yeso Elementary), though the building still stands.

New Mexico has a long history with nuclear weapons, hosting both the main research site and the first nuclear detonation of the Manhattan project, but that state was not unique in focusing on civil defense in the 60’s.  The US as a whole was kind of obsessed with it for a while.  The nuclear threat never disappeared, of course, but these days other potential disasters are seared into the public consciousness.  (Lockdown drills, anyone?)

Despite how we make fun of civil defense in the 50s and 60s (and it definitely had its absurd moments), there actually is a point to being prepared for a nuclear or radiation emergency still today.  It may be impossible for a person to survive at the center of an atomic fireball, or for civilization to quickly recover from a full-scale nuclear exchange.  But there are still places where lives could be saved from nuclear and radioactive hazards: at the outer edge of a limited atomic strike, or in range of a terrorist’s “dirty bomb”, or near a nuclear power disaster.  The aging survivors of the attacks Hiroshima and Nagasaki can attest that it is possible to recover, as horrific as this situation would be.

The current best advice is to shelter inside any building as soon as possible – ideally in a basement or the middle floors of a tall building, since radioactive dust settles on the roof and the ground level.  Of course, the true best advice is to work on keeping the world peaceful enough that we never need to use our emergency preparations.  But living in the world we do today, I really can’t blame the people of Artesia for wanting a backup plan.

Coming soon: A Tale of Two Hyderabads