Still, Judge said, there were many that were scrupulously maintained for years during the Cold War. Lack of space in many shelters - the defunct shelter advertised in Framingham can hold only 950 people - and their proximity to major targets kept the program from achieving its goal of a nationwide network of readily-available shelters.

Though federally funded, the shelter network never really lived up to its billing as safe harbor for the nation's population. 'Fallout shelters, specifically the buildings that still have those fallout shelter (signs), they're still up because nobody ever took them down,' said Peter Judge, spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.īegun as a Civil Defense initiative during the Kennedy administration, the idea was to create a network of shelters in existing buildings which were outfitted with enough food, water and sleeping areas to allow people to survive the aftermath of a nuclear blast. It's faded now, and barely legible, but for anyone who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the words 'fallout shelter' conjure images of 'duck-and-cover' drills and the palpable fear of nuclear war.Īlthough fallout shelters were once scattered throughout dozens of buildings, public and private alike, most exist today only in memory - or are used for storage. Though probably unnoticed by the dozens of drivers passing the company's Union Avenue office daily and the dozens of employees working in the building, Verizon's Framingham office bears the mark of a frightening time in American history. As cell phone company pitches go, Verizon in Framingham may have one of the best - after all, how many other phone companies might be able to save you from a nuclear attack?

Fallout shelters plans