YORK, Pa. — In 1951, during the Cold War, Pennsylvania created the State Council of Civil Defense. By 1968, the organization had stocked about 6,700 public nuclear fallout shelters that could serve roughly 3.2 million people for two weeks.
Now, Chris Sallade walks down the cement stairs in the back of his family's downtown York flower shop, which also happens to be the site of one of the few remaining fallout shelters in Pennsylvania.
"My family's owned the building since the 1930s," said Sallade of the Chas. A. Schaefer Flower Shop on West Market Street.
Although Sallade has frequented the building since the 1970's, he wasn't around when the federal government made its basement an official fallout shelter in the 1950s.
As decades passed, the owners of the flower shop decided to hold onto the items, never opening a box until now.
"We always thought it would be sort of a unique historical part of York," said Sallade.
Tearing into the dust-covered boxes among the metal storage containers of drinking water, Sallade finds tins of crackers, medical books and other survival supplies for a potential nuclear attack and the ensuing fallout.
He says neither Pennsylvania nor federal government officials have asked him about the shelter. Still, he grins and says he worries about federal punishment for disposing of decades-old nuclear fallout supplies.
"I think it's cool to have any type of slice of history of any party of York county," said Sallade. "Someday, somebody might look at one of those signs and come see us."
The flower shop isn't the only building in the area with remnants of fallout shelters built during the Cold War, but the signs left on the walls around town are some of the very few lingering historical markers left behind from a tense time in the nation's history.