Chernobyl Accident Revives Little Southland Interest in Bomb Shelters

The radioactive cloud from Chernobyl was headed his way.

So James Brawner did the most prudent thing he could think of the day that the Soviets tersely disclosed that their power plant had sustained “an accident.”

The 27-year-old manager of a Canoga Park auto-repair shop took a stack of printed yellow flyers with him to a Ventura Freeway off-ramp in Woodland Hills and spent three hours handing out 300 of them to motorists.

“Warning,” stated Brawner’s flyer. “I am offering your survival and protection from nuclear radiation, for your kids, family and loved ones. . . . I am offering a private living quarters in a nuclear bomb shelter.”

A few days later, scientists along the West Coast were waiting at their monitoring equipment to measure radioactivity drifting from the Soviet Union. Brawner was waiting at his rented postal box to measure interest in his proposed $5,000 bomb-shelter condominiums.

Levels for both turned out to be low.

Atmospheric fallout from the Chernobyl incident contained only slight traces of iodine 131, cesium, rubidium and barium. The popular fallout was even more faint.

Not a Single Response

Brawner did not receive a single inquiry about the $2-million fallout shelter he hopes to build in the desert near Lancaster to house 400 people.

State and federal civil defense officials say they are not experiencing a run on backyard bomb shelter blueprints that they keep on hand for homeowners, nor are local building and safety officials who issue construction permits for structures such as shelters.

“I don’t know of any recent applications,” said Lou Robins, assistant San Fernando Valley manager for the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.

“I can’t say I’m aware of any trend,” said Don Pinegar, senior emergency operations planner for the state Office of Emergency Services in Sacramento. “I haven’t sensed any as a result of Chernobyl.”

Flurries of Interest

Previous periods of world crisis have prompted flurries of interest in fallout shelters, said Russell Clanahan, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman in Washington.

“In the past, during times like the Iranian crisis and at the start of the Afghanistan war, there have been measurable upsurges in public interest,” Clanahan said. “In all honesty, I haven’t experienced any this time.”

The Russian reactor explosion caused a brief--very brief--interest in his backyard for Ron Lyons.

Lyons owns a Thousand Oaks home that was equipped with a fallout shelter when it was constructed 25 years ago. The 8-by-10-foot concrete-block structure is buried under two feet of dirt next to his back steps.

“I thought of it a little bit,” said Lyons, who moved into the house two years ago.

“But the condition the shelter’s in sort of put me off. It’s in disrepair and the air vent system is gone. I’d rather face the aftereffects of radiation than asphyxiate down there.”

One of 20 Houses

Lyons’ home is one of 20 in the Sunset Conejo development in the center of Thousand Oaks built with shelters between 1960 and 1962. The Spartan $1,500 concrete enclosures were used by subdivider Richard Doremus to attract customers.

The shelter was barely mentioned by the real estate agent when Lyons decided to buy the house, though. Lyons, a publications manager for a computer company, was looking for a house with a roomy backyard and plenty of space for a garden.

Accessible by steep, concrete steps, the shelter is closed off by a 60-pound, steel trapdoor, its hinges long ago rusted off. These days the dank, underground room is inhabited by frogs and spiders.

Lyons said his long-range goal is to clean up the shelter, build a new doorway and turn it into a wine cellar or a root cellar.

Elaborate Shelter

Twenty miles away in Woodland Hills, Don Dye’s elaborate fallout shelter is plush and clean. But it is equally ignored.

Dye’s multimillion-dollar shelter was built in the 1950s at the Shoup Avenue ranch of John D. Hertz, the car-rental king and one-time Yellow Cab Co. owner who died in 1961 at the age of 82.

The shelter is shaped like a submarine and contains a series of sealed interior compartments that sleep 30. It has its own electric generating system and kitchen and an elevator descends 38 feet to the shelter’s entrance. Lush landscaping and a waterfall camouflage the mound that tops the shelter.

“We don’t use it for storage or anything, but the shelter is still there,” said Dye, whose family purchased the Hertz ranch in 1957 as a site for its Pinecrest Schools and still uses the adjoining home. Dye said federal officials came to Woodland Hills to study the shelter shortly after the family bought it.

“They were going to use it as a model for one at the White House. The Secret Service came out and White House people were in there measuring it. This is probably the granddaddy of bomb shelters,” he said.

“Maybe it would be better if it wasn’t still here. We have to pay to keep it up and have the radioactivity fallout machine inspected every year.”

Others take their shelters more seriously, however.

Began Working Faster

After the Chernobyl disaster, Newbury Park homeowner Larry Fransen picked up the pace of work on the do-it-yourself shelter he has been building for two years.

The reinforced-concrete structure is about 11 1/2 by 8 feet in size--roomy enough to house his family of four for up to three months, said Fransen, who is an engineering technician for the City of Thousand Oaks.

Because he based the shelter on a federally supplied design and then dug the hole and poured the cement himself, Fransen figures his finished shelter will cost about $5,000. A comparable structure built by an outside contractor would have cost $15,000, he estimates.

Fransen said his neighbors thought his project odd when they learned that his backyard hole was not for a swimming pool.

“Most people think you can’t possibly survive a nuclear war. I know you can survive,” he said. “The vast majority of casualties won’t be from the blast. . . . They will be from radiation and the hunger and malnutrition that will follow.”

Fransen said he briefly teamed up with a Conejo Valley contractor to market his modified shelter plans, but the venture withered from lack of interest. “We got zero response and he dropped off after six months,” Fransen said of the contractor.

In the Calabasas area, Prof. Ron Hood of California State University, Northridge, found that his 4-year-old, 1,000-square-foot shelter was a definite advantage when he sold his ranch home two weeks ago.

Built Into Hillside

Hood built the Quonset hut-shaped steel shelter into a hillside on a 95-acre parcel to protect electronic equipment as well as friends and family members.

The property was bought by a Los Angeles firm that will develop part of the acreage, but will retain the shelter as a storage site meant to protect computer tapes from the electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear blast, Hood said.

“They said they were worried about what was drifting our direction,” Hood said of the unidentified buyer. “They were concerned about San Onofre (nuclear power plant) . . . that kind of thing.”

Hood’s shelter contains four bedrooms and he used it as a combination guest house and office. He said it contained “some serious air-purification” equipment along with a water well and a 3,000-gallon water tank.

When he built his shelter, he discovered from his neighbors that many of them had shelters of their own, said Hood, who teaches courses in survival.

“As people talked to me, I discovered that at least half of them had shelters built when their houses were built,” he said. “They all had the same idea. Some were just little concrete boxes, 10 by 14 feet. But one was completely upholstered and had a hot tub and was as cute as hell.”

Hood said he plans to build another shelter at his new home in Green Valley “sometime in the next six months.”

Would Just Watch a War

“What I want to survive is a nuclear meltdown or earthquake or terrorist attack. I don’t know if I would want to survive a nuclear conflict. I probably would grab a six-pack of beer and sit out and watch.”

Others feel it would be a mistake to take a nuclear attack sitting down, however.

Nancy D. Greene, wife of actor Lorne Greene, is president of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Defense Assn., a 3,500-member group that supports a national program of emergency preparedness.

“Nuclear war can be survived, it’s not a false hope,” Greene said. “It’s a lot easier than you think, unless the bomb is right on top of you.”

However, Greene said, she and her husband do not have a fallout shelter at their Mandeville Canyon home--although they have a “getaway boat” that could take them to shelter behind Santa Catalina Island, and they own a “survival house at Lake Tahoe.”

No one knows for certain how many private shelters exist in the Los Angeles area. No governmental agency keeps a registry of private shelter construction permits, many builders do not obtain construction permits and others take out permits identifying shelters as wine cellars or storage rooms.

But Greene speculates that there are many privately owned shelters in Los Angeles “that people don’t talk about,” modern shelters quietly built into newly constructed custom homes as well as 1950s-vintage concrete boxes buried behind subdivision homes in such areas as Cheviot Hills on the Westside.

Not a New Idea

Condominium-type shelters are not a new idea, either.

A community-style bomb shelter built in 1961 in Livermore, Calif., by a group of nuclear scientists from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was designed to accommodate 150 people.

The 50-by-100-foot, concrete-and-steel underground bunker was built with small cubicles for families that belong to the group, called Survival Associates Inc. Founding members of the group each put $2,000 into the project and sold their shares when they resigned or moved.

Four years ago, LaVerkin, Utah, land developer Lane Blackmore set out to do the same thing with a $10-million, 240-unit underground condominium shelter he planned to call Terrene Ark I.

Units were offered for sale at prices ranging from $25,000 to $97,000, depending on floor space. Down payments were made by 44 investors before the project was shelved 1 1/2 years ago and all earnest money was returned, Blackmore said.

“We never got it off the ground, or in the ground, so to speak,” Blackmore said. “It was a matter of timing. About $4 million would have been needed to get going. We just started out too weak for the project.”

Condo Shelter on Hold

News stories about the project resulted in 15,000 inquiries--enough interest to keep the condominium shelter concept alive for Blackmore, however. “It’s on the back burner for now, but it’s just a matter of a new batch of minds getting together to do it,” he said from his home near St. George, Utah.