Nobody would have eaten those.”ĭederick, a former biology teacher, was also serving as assistant director of civil defense for the city of Kingston in April 1972 when he was assigned the task of going to every fallout shelter in Ulster County and removing stores of Phenobarbital, a barbiturate drug that was meant to be used as a sedative for the injured. The crackers, Dederick said, “were rancid. And by the late 1960s, most of those candies had eaten by students who had discovered the cache. At Kingston High, which could hold about 2,000 people, the kit included maybe 150 pieces of candy, he said. “I imagine there would have been quite a fight for that candy,” Dederick said. “If the roof of the auditorium collapses, it collapses into the basement.”įallout shelters were established in schools, church basements, hotels and armories that could safely hold at least 50 people and provide “sufficient fallout protection.” Each was stocked with supplies to last two weeks, which planners figured was the minimum time needed for protection against radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion. “They put them under the auditoriums for the most part, where the boiler rooms are, and that’s a no-no,” said William Dederick, a retired Kingston High School vice principal who served as the city’s civil defense director, later emergency management coordinator, for nearly 30 years. “You had to go out into the hall, get down on your knees, put your head against the wall and put your hands over your head,” Salzmann said, describing the exercise known as “duck and cover.” The drills would begin with a startling blast from a compressed air horn over the school’s loudspeaker by Mr. “The fire drills were always kind of fun,” he said. Kingston Fire Chief Richard Salzmann, 49, remembers taking part in civil defense drills as a student at the Wall Street school in the late 1950s. On the north side of George Washington Elementary School, the school-bus-yellow sign is marked with three inverted triangles in a circle above the words “Fallout Shelter.” The school was one of dozens of places around Ulster County that were designated to provide protection from radioactive fallout in the event of a nuclear attack by the former Soviet Union. 11, when another kind of insecurity took hold of the country. KINGSTON – A weathered metal sign on a school building evokes memories of a time long before Sept.
0 kommentar(er)
