How many shelters remain tucked away in private homes is anyone’s guess.With Real Extinction Level Threats All Around Us Only a handful of such bunkers are still maintained in the state, including those in its emergency operations centers and another, reportedly, in the leaky tunnels beneath the State House in Annapolis. Most public shelters were dismantled, their medical supplies donated to local fire departments for training aids and their stale foodstuffs - more than 2,600 tons of high-protein biscuits in Maryland alone - were buried in landfills or fed to pigs. The cramped sanctuaries built to provide refuge for two weeks (while radiation abated) morphed into playrooms, pantries and man caves. Over time, tensions with the Soviet Union eased and, by the end of the decade, talks had begun to limit the number of long-range missiles on both sides. “I’d prefer to die like a man on the face of the earth, with a last look at the sun, rather than like a rat in an underground box made of reinforced concrete,” wrote Ivor Kraft of Baltimore. And at Fox Ridge, in Essex, developers of the 3,000 homes there promised each would include a 7-by-12-foot concrete chamber under the front porch, which could double as a game room or office. In Cedonia, a new neighborhood off Belair Road, a family could add an escape room to its floor plans for $325. In Odenton, each of the 268 houses in the planned Maple Ridge community would have them.

Homebuilders added shelters to their designs. In Northeast Baltimore, managers of a new 128-room Holiday Inn on Loch Raven Boulevard trumpeted the fact that the motel’s meeting rooms could double as fallout shelters, approved by the U.S. In 1961, more than 100 neighborhood groups in Baltimore County - notably in Pikesville, Randallstown and Dundalk - made plans to build “community” shelters to house anywhere from five to 100 families. In some areas, homeowners coalesced to protect one another. Nonetheless, Armco Steel Corp., on East Chase Street, began selling 9-by-10-foot fallout shelters ranging from what it called “a simple basement unit for less than $400 to a spacious underground providing what civil defense described as ‘absolute protection.’“

Fallout shelter plans project