Huntsville, Ala. — In an age of al-Qaeda, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation’s most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.
Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community’s shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the surrounding county.
Emergency planners in the out-of-the-way city, best known as the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, say the idea makes sense because radioactive fallout could be scattered for hundreds of miles if terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb.
“If Huntsville is in the blast zone, there’s not much we can do. But if it’s just fallout shelters would absorb 90 percent of the radiation,” said longtime emergency-management planner Kirk Paradise, whose Cold War expertise with fallout shelters led officials to renew Huntsville’s program.
Huntsville’s project, developed using $70,000 from a Homeland Security grant, goes against the grain because the United States essentially scrapped its national plan for fallout shelters after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Homeland Security created a metropolitan protection program that includes nuclear-attack preparation and mass shelters. But no other city has taken the idea as far as Huntsville has, officials said.
As fallout shelters go, the Three Caves Quarry just outside downtown offers the kind of protection that would make Dr. Strangelove proud, with space for an arena-size crowd of some 20,000 people.
Last mined in the early 1950s, the limestone quarry is dug 300 yards into the side of a mountain, with ceilings as high as 60 feet and 10 acres of floor space covered with jagged rocks.
Jet black in places with a year-round temperature of about 60 degrees, it has a colony of bats living in its highest reaches and baby stalactites hanging from the ceiling.
“It would be a little trying, but it’s better than the alternative,” said Andy Prewett, a manager with the Land Trust of Huntsville and North Alabama, a nonprofit preservation group that owns the mine and is making it available for free.
Plans call for staying inside for as long as two weeks after a bomb blast, though shelters might be needed for only a few hours in a less dire emergency.
The new shelters will not be stocked with water, food or other supplies. For survivors of a nuclear attack, it would be bring your own everything.
