The Hundreds of Forgotten Fallout Shelters Scattered in the Wilderness

Imagine you are hiking in the woods. Emerging into a clearing, you stumble upon an unusual sight: a circular metal hatch like a manhole cover, protruding from the ground. Curious, you lift open the hatch to reveal a ladder, plunging down a vertical shaft into the earth. After taking a moment to gather your courage – after all, who knows what might be down there? – you climb down the ladder to find yourself in a cramped cylindrical chamber. The space is bare save for a pair of metal bunks, a set of wooden shelves, and a hand-cranked air pump bolted to the walls. The paint on the walls is peeling, and the air is damp and musty; nobody has been down here for a long time. An eerie feeling washes over you, and you quickly scramble up the ladder and continue on your hike, leaving the mysterious chamber to moulder away in the wilderness.

If you hike often in the backwoods of Canada, you may very well have had such an encounter. Dating from the early 1960s, these structures, known as Fallout Reporting Posts or FRPs, formed part of a vast coast-to-coast network of fallout shelters meant to protect Canadian citizens in the event of a nuclear war. But this system was abandoned before it could enter service, leaving hundreds of crumbling relics scattered across the countryside. This is the story of the Nuclear Detonation and Fallout Reporting System, Canada’s forgotten Cold War safeguard.

While the Cold War is typically portrayed as an ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, many other nations played key roles – few more so than Canada. Geography alone made Canada strategically vital, positioned as it was directly between the two superpowers. As part of its commitment to the North American Aerospace Command or NORAD, between 1951 and 1957 Canada built three chains of radar stations – the Pine Tree, Mid-Canada, and Distant Early Warning or DEW Lines – across the country to provide early warning of Soviet nuclear bombers flying over the North Pole. The nation also deployed hundreds of fighter interceptors and surface-to-air missiles – many armed with nuclear warheads – to shoot down these bombers before they could reach populated areas. And overseas, Canadian Army and Air Force units stationed in Germany, France, and elsewhere formed a key component of NATO forces tasked with countering a Soviet ground invasion of Western Europe.

Yet the possibility of Soviet bombers or missiles penetrating NORAD defences and reaching Canadian cities remained frighteningly real. So, like most nations during this period, Canada attempted to establish a Civil Defence strategy to ensure its population’s survival following a nuclear exchange. While the trials, tribulations, and ultimate failure of Canada’s Cold War Civil Defense are beyond the scope of this video, in brief, the nation’s response to the threat of nuclear war was marked by fierce bickering and buck-passing between the various levels of government and the Military over what strategy should be adopted and who should bear responsibility for implementing it. At the time, many nations opted for a comprehensive, top-down approach to Civil Defence. In Sweden, for example, the government built massive communal fallout shelters and passed laws requiring developers to incorporate a fallout shelter into every new house and commercial building. And in the United States, most major cities designated several large basements as communal fallout shelters. But the Canadian Government rejected this approach, arguing that it lacked the resources to protect a population spread out over such a large area. Instead, the Government promoted a strategy of “shelter in place” and “self help”, distributing pamphlets instructing ordinary citizens how to build their own basement fallout shelters. Communities were also encouraged to form local militias who would rush into bombed cities to fight fires and rescue people trapped in the rubble.

Unfortunately, this strategy was less than well-received by the Canadian public. For one thing, the Government’s proposed home fallout shelters cost $500 to build – equivalent to 10% of the average household income and beyond the means of most families. Even worse, in September 1961, George Brimmell, an investigative reporter for the Toronto Telegram, revealed the construction of a giant fallout shelter outside Ottawa, meant to house the Prime Minister and other top government officials in the event of nuclear war. Officially known as the Emergency Government Headquarters but derisively nicknamed the “Diefenbunker” after then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker [NOTE: pronounced “DEEF-en-baker”], the construction of the shelter enraged the Canadian public, who blasted politicians for hypocritically spending millions to save their own skins after stating it had no resources to protect the people.

Government hypocrisy aside, by the time the Diefenbunker was revealed to the public, Canadian Civil Defense had already been thrown into chaos by new developments in nuclear weapons technology. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Civil Defence was largely based on strategies developed during the Second World War. At the time, nuclear weapons were seen as little different from conventional high-explosive or incendiary bombs – just bigger. But all this changed on March 1, 1952, when the United States detonated Castle Bravo, the world’s first practical, air-deliverable thermonuclear weapon or “Hydrogen Bomb”. Unlike kiloton-range nuclear bombs like those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Megaton-range thermonuclear bombs could obliterate all but the largest cities, rendering “shelter in place” strategies obsolete overnight. Furthermore, development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs in the late 1950s nullified the protection provided by early warning radars, fighter interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles, leaving North America all but defenceless.

Against such apocalyptic weapons, the only defence was to not be there when the bomb went off. Consequently, major Canadian cities began drawing up elaborate plans to evacuate their populations into the countryside within three hours of receiving an attack warning. Besides the nightmarish logistics of directing, housing, and feeding millions of panicked people, such plans ran up against another major obstacle: nuclear fallout. Fallout consists of soil, dust, water, and other debris which is sucked up into the nuclear fireball, irradiated, and falls back to earth like snow, contaminating everything it touches. Prior to 1954, the threat of fallout had not been taken very seriously, with Civil Defence planners focusing largely on the bomb’s thermal and blast effects. However, the Castle Bravo test, which contaminated huge swathes of the Pacific Ocean, brought this potentially lethal problem into the public consciousness and confronted Canadian Civil Defence planners with a troubling conundrum: what was the point of fleeing a nuclear blast in the city only to die from fallout in the countryside?

By the late 1950s, it became clear that Canada needed some sort of system to track the drift of fallout and help direct evacuees away from the most heavily-contaminated areas. But what should such a system look like? In 1956, the United States established the Radiation Alert Network or RAN, a system of automatic radiation monitors installed on Federal buildings across the country. The Canadian government, however, deemed such a system too technically complex to implement, and opted instead to copy that used by the United Kingdom’s Warning and Monitoring Organization, consisting of a network of 1,500 small four-man fallout shelters buried throughout the British Isles. When an attack alert was received, UKWMO volunteers would descend into the shelters and use a variety of instruments to locate and track nuclear detonations and fallout, reporting their findings via telephone or radio to a central processing office. This approach was considered more feasible for Canada to implement, and in June 1960 the Cabinet Committee on Emergency Plans approved the construction of a similar system known as the Nuclear Detonation and Fallout Reporting System or NDFRS.

The initial concept for NDFRS was extremely ambitious, comprising a network of some 2,000 small fallout shelters called Fallout Reporting Posts or FRPs distributed across all nine provinces and two northern territories. These were arranged in a grid roughly 15 miles apart north-south and 45 miles east-west stretching from the U.S. border to the 55th parallel. When an attack warning was received, local volunteers would enter the FRPs and remain there either until the alert was called off or outside radiation levels had fallen to safe levels, with the typical FRP being stocked with enough food, water, and other provisions to sustain two people for two weeks. Once inside the FRPs, the volunteers would use various instruments to monitor outside radiation levels, making and recording measurements on an hourly basis. In addition to FRPs, the system also included another shelter type called a NUDET – short for Nuclear Detonation – placed close to major cities and other likely targets. These were fitted with instruments designed to pinpoint the location and yield of nearby nuclear explosions. One of these instruments, affectionately known as the “educated stovepipe”, was deceptively simple, consisting of a vertical length of metal pipe drilled with numerous holes and containing a block of polystyrene foam. The thermal pulse from a nearby nuclear detonation would burn holes in the foam, the location and depth of which would indicate the direction and yield of the bomb.

Data from the FRPs and NUDETs would be transmitted to provincial offices called Filter Centres, where it would be interpreted and processed before being passed along to the Emergency Government Headquarters in Ottawa. From here, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or CBC would broadcast announcements across the country instructing citizens on when to take shelter or evacuate their homes and inform them which fallout-contaminated areas to avoid.

Construction of NDFRS began in the summer of 1960 under the auspices of the Army and Department Work To simplify logistics and cut costs, wherever possible FRPs and NUDETs were built on federal government property, such as Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments, forestry stations, Armed Forces bases, Customs Service border posts, post offices, and Department of Transport weather stations, with volunteers to man the shelters being drawn from among the personnel of these organizations. Shelters were also built at railway stations belonging to the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railways.

Shelter sites were selected to fit the planned grid system as closely as possible, while the design of each shelter depended on the available infrastructure and local geography at each site. If a pre-existing basement was available, a Type A shelter was installed. This consisted of a small cinder-block enclosure built into the corner of the basement, and was the most common style of FRPs. If no basement was available, a Type B shelter was installed. This consisted of a small cylindrical chamber buried in the ground and accessed through a vertical hatch and shaft, as described at the start of this video. Finally, if a site was too remote or the water table too high to bury a Type B shelter, a Type C shelter was erected instead. Built of cinder blocks, this was similar to a Type A shelter but constructed above ground instead of in a basement. Standard equipment for all three shelter types included a pair of bunk beds; shelving for rations, water, and other provisions; a chemical toilet; an electric or hand-powered ventilation pump with filters for removing fallout; and remote radiation monitoring instruments.

But while seemingly sound on paper, in practice NDFRS proved frustratingly difficult to implement. For one thing, the FRPs were more expensive to build than anticipated. For example, even with the benefit of government suppliers and economies of scale, a basic Type A shelter cost $700 – a somewhat embarrassing figure for a government which had tried to convince the average citizen they could construct an effective basement shelter for less than $500. Even more embarrassingly, the government’s decision to build FRPs on federal property – a move intended to bypass the anticipated hassle of dealing with the private sector – often backfired. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police proved especially troublesome to deal with. At the time, RCMP detachments in small, remote towns tended to rent out private homes, meaning the original owners had to be consulted before a fallout shelter could be constructed. Some detachments even outright refused to allow a shelter to be built, claiming that they were already using the space for other purposes. Elsewhere, jurisdictional disputes between the Army and other Federal and Provincial departments resulted in significant delays in selecting FRP sites and installing shelters. Ironically, private organizations like the railroads proved easier to deal with, often dedicating themselves enthusiastically to the cause of national defence.

Nonetheless, the Army, spurred on by the Berlin Crisis of August 1961, pushed ahead with construction, rushing to get NDFRS operational by January 1962. But soon a number of serious flaws in the system began to emerge – perhaps none so fatal as the problem of communication. While CN and RP rail FRPs used the railway telegraph system and RCMP shelters the police radio network, most shelters were expected to report their readings to the filter centres through ordinary civilian telephone lines. But there was a tiny problem: these lines ran through central exchanges, located in major cities – the same cities that would be obliterated in a nuclear attack. This meant that as soon as a nuclear war broke out, much of the NDFRS system would be rendered useless – whoopsie doodle…

Another major problem involved finding sufficient volunteers to man the FRPs and NUDETs. The shelters were only designed to house two people, meaning that if a nuclear war broke out, shelter operators would be forced to leave their families on the surface to fend for themselves. As a result, few stepped forward to volunteers. As Major-General John Rockingham, commander of the Army’s Quebec Command pointed out:

“…it is unrealistic to expect a man to operate in a fallout shelter for 14 days if his family is also not supplied with a shelter. Hence these [FRPs] should be large enough to accommodate the operator and his family.”

Ultimately, as a form of incentive, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Churchill of the Army Engineers allowed volunteers to bring their families down into the shelters with them, stating:

“…the advantages provided to the individual and his family when he undertakes this responsibility far outweigh any inconveniences.”

But while this may have sounded like an appealing deal to prospective volunteers, in reality it would have proven more of a curse than a blessing, for another major flaw with NDFRS involved the acquisition and distribution of radiation monitoring instruments. It was initially intended that all FRPs and NUDETs be equipped with the IM-108/TD remote monitoring radiacmeter, which had a surface-mounted probe to allow radiation to be safely monitored from within the shelter. But the Army soon ran out of these instruments, and as an interim solution began issuing FRPs with regular handheld radiation meters. This meant that in the event of nuclear war, hundreds of unlucky NDFRS volunteers would have been forced to don radiation suits and climb out of their shelters every hour in order to take a reading. Each excursion would have allowed fallout particles to infiltrate the FRP – where, remember, the volunteers’ families would likely be sheltering – and forced the volunteers to use part of their extremely limited water supply to decontaminate themselves. In short, it would have been a death sentence.

Soon, however, spiralling costs and a slumping economy forced NDFRS to be continually scaled back, with all planned shelters north of the 52nd parallel ultimately being cancelled as an austerity measure. Then, in 1963, the federal government cancelled NDFRS altogether. At the time of the cancellation, around 1,200 of the planned 2,000 FRPs and NUDETs had been constructed. Few, however, had been fitted with radiation monitoring instruments, communications equipment, or survival supplies, and none had been actively manned by volunteers.

But why did the government cancel NDFRS when it was so close to completion? While cost overruns and the system’s many operational flaws played a large part in the decision, another major factor was the rapidly-changing geopolitical landscape. Throughout the early Cold War, western defence planners assumed that any major confrontation with the Soviets would inevitably result in a nuclear exchange. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, however, challenged this assumption, with the superpowers managing to pull themselves back from the brink of armageddon via diplomatic means. As a result, Canadian foreign and defence policy shifted from trying to survive nuclear war towards trying to avoid it altogether. Massive civil defence projects like NDFRS soon became seen as redundant. This shift aligned well with the average Canadian citizen’s attitude towards civil defence. Unlike their American counterparts, most Canadians refused to accept that a nuclear war was winnable or survivable, and, despite ardent government propaganda campaigns, remained largely apathetic about civil defence precautions.

While several jurisdictions across Canada attempted to maintain their FRPs in good condition as a precaution, these were eventually abandoned or repurposed into root cellars and storage rooms. Many others were demolished, with the CN and CP railways ordering all their shelters scrapped in the early 1970s. But hundreds still remain scattered across the country, hidden in people’s basements or rusting away in remote parklands – silent and forgotten relics of a frightening time when the world lived in the shadow of nuclear armageddon.

If you found this story interesting and want to learn more about NDFRS, be sure to check out Our Own Devices, the personal YouTube channel of this video’s writer, Gilles Messier. Much of the information in this video is drawn directly from Gilles’ original archival and field research on surviving NDFRS shelters, which he covers in greater detail on his channel.

Expand for References