Norman is shuttering its four community shelters on July 1, the University of Oklahoma Police Department warns in a storm preparedness document.Īuthorities in Edmond used to open school doors for citizens seeking public refuge, but not anymore, The Oklahoman’s Bryan Dean reports. Statewide, community shelters are being closed. Oklahoma’s Civil Defense agency loaned out copies “Protection Factor 100” and other films to local emergency management officials to encourage them to help survey public and private buildings for community shelter space.īut it’s getting hard for Oklahomans to find public shelter space. The fallout shelter signs let the public know where they could go during a nuclear strike. “I would like to congratulate the Civil Defense Agency in the excellent progress made in preparing Oklahoma for a national disaster I hope will never come,” he told The Daily Oklahoman in July 1964.īy that year, more than 600,000 shelters - in structures like banks, hotels, libraries, post offices, schools and hospitals - were marked with placards emblazoned with that familiar logo: three yellow triangles in a black circle. In 1964, then-Governor Henry Bellmon said that Oklahoma had more than a half million licensed fallout shelters, and bragged that its public shelter program outpaced other those in other states. And public shelter spaces are disappearing from the map. That threat never materialized, but the state is targeted by tornadoes every year. They found basements and tunnels, underground parking garages and well-built structures in municipal and private buildings.Īt the time, Oklahoma’s big worry was an attack from Soviet Russia. In the 1960s, survey teams of architects and engineers started hunting across Oklahoma for places to hunker down. A '50s-era map from Oklahoma's Civil Defense agency shows how government officials were studying how shelters could be used to protect the public from the threat of atomic weapons.
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