Today in history: Seattle began constructing the only U.S. fallout shelter tucked in an interstate

On this day 60 years ago,  Seattle started building a future for itself. Like many Seattle infrastructure projects, this one wouldn't necessarily pan out in the way leaders might've hoped. But it also presented a possibility for an alternative future for the city — on May 15, 1962 city officials broke ground on a new fallout shelter being built in Ravenna.

The shelter would go up relatively quickly, for how long it had been in the making; after years of the Cold War heating up, the U.S. conducting nuclear attack drills, proposal and design, and executive orders instructing "effective and viable civil defense," officials broke ground in May 1962 and finished by March 1963.

And though the whole thing had seemed novel at first — Seattle constructed the new shelter under the newly-built Interstate 5 snaking its way through the city — almost just as quickly, the world moved on.

"By the time it got built, people were realizing that the idea of surviving a nuclear war was just insane," said Scott Williams, manager of the Washington State Department's cultural resources program, which handles the archaeology and history items for WSDOT.

"There weren't enough fallout shelters in the country, and it was essentially a waste of money is how a lot of people viewed it. So no other fallout shelters were built under interstates anywhere else in the country."

That makes Seattle unique with its city-built fallout shelter underneath I-5, where it still sits today.

And though the spot never got used in the event of a nuclear attack, it did get used. According to Williams, in order to get approval to build it from the Bureau of Public Roads (which later became the Federal Highway Administration, and had jurisdiction over the growing interstate system), the city had to abide by the Bureau's rule that things built into the interstate weren't just empty, open spaces.

So, as a secondary use, the fallout shelter also operated as a Department of Licensing office from 1963 to 1977.

The shelter is a good size, but it's not exactly roomy or comfortable (perhaps making it perfect for a DOL office). Per a 2010 WSDOT blog entry about the shelter:

• Very little of the fallout shelter is designed for aesthetic appeal or comfort. From the folding metal chairs to the impossibly small bathrooms, to the institutional green and mauve color scheme, the fallout shelter is government utilitarianism at its best. A giant concrete pillar in the center of the shelter supports the 18-inch-thick concrete roof of the 3,000-square-foot room. From overhead, the muffled sounds of I-5 traffic filter into the shelter.
• ... To the left, down the hallway leading to the escape tunnel, are two doors to his-and-hers bathrooms and decontamination showers. For the suggested 200 shelter-ees: Three toilets, one urinal, two sinks, two showers. All of which are accessible through doorways that – at best – might be 28 inches wide. It's enough to make airline bathrooms seem positively spacious in comparison.

It was not designed for a lot of comfort (those showers have just a 40-gallon hot water tank for all 200 people), and it's unclear how thought through the design really was — there isn't even a kitchen, and instruction manuals that survived in the shelter instruct residents to warm cans of food in their armpits.

But there was a protocol in place for how the shelter was supposed to be used: among the instructional material left behind, the shelter manager would let the first 200 people in (be the neighborhood residents or just travelers along the highway) before locking the door and directing anyone else who comes to the next available shelter. 

"Of which there weren't any," Williams said.

Though Seattle officials continued to designate buildings and basements as potential fallout shelters (as many as 867 of them), Williams says the impracticability of the defense was starting to dawn on more and more people, cutting into any interest in building more.

After all, not only would you need to build out thousands of fallout shelters sitting empty for most of the time for a city like Seattle, but the actual bomb technology was improving and getting bigger — making most plans to hide under your desk or in a basement futile.

"It's a really stark reminder of how people were pretty desperate or hopeful that they could survive a nuclear attack," Williams said.

"You really have to look back at the history of that time, at the fear of an imminent nuclear attack, especially by the Soviet Union. But I don't think people really grasped the power of nuclear bombs at the time; they could see the results of the ones dropped in Japan. But from 1945 to 1960, the bombs got bigger and bigger and hydrogen bombs got invented."

Though it wouldn't be until July 1982 that then-Mayor Charles Royer would officially withdraw Seattle from planning for a nuclear war, calling the Federal Emergency Mangement Agency's plans to evacuate the population of Seattle to east of the Cascades "virtually useless," and that they would not "lend credence to the dangerous idea that a nuclear war is a manageable emergency."

After 1977, the shelter began being used as a storage facility for WSDOT, either for paper records or furniture that was in the process of being moved. After that, it was largely closed to the public, with Williams pointing to just a few "problems with homeless people moving in," or attempts for public tours.

And while it is mostly just a big empty room that officials don't expect to be all that interesting to tour groups, the shelter still sits underneath I-5 in Ravenna (the street address is considered to be 6800 Weedin Place N.E), complete with escape hatches, a generator, an air filtration system, and a locked door.

Keep scrolling to see more images of the only fallout shelter built into a highway anywhere in the nation.