On 5/1/13 2:19 PM, Jean Nathan wrote:
Now you can laugh at us.
I wouldn't dare -- you might dig up one of *our* bomb-shelter designs.
I don't recall any details, but I do recall my parents' derision -- "fall-out shelter" designs claimed to be good for two weeks of nuclear war, but none were any use for five minutes of tornado. Dad did suggest that a shelter that doubled as a root cellar would be a good idea, but I never heard of anybody building any shelter at all.
For tornadoes, we went into the basement. On Palm Sunday (Wikipedia says it was 1965), one of my cousins was hit, and the family probably would have been killed if the storm hadn't dropped an old boxcar they had been using for storage into the cellar first, and that caught the other debris.
Sometimes it bothers me that we can't have cellars in this neighborhood. (The water table is close to the surface. Last week swaths of my lawn were lower than the water table.) The daughter of a building contractor lives down the street in a house built by her father; it used a new-fangled construction method in which forms made of insulation are filled with re-inforced concrete, and he said it was tornado shelter all over.
A summer cottage owned by my brother-in-law has a concrete storage shed built into the side of a hill, which he presumes was built as a storm cellar.
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