Emergency Fallout Shelter

Look for a commercial or industrial business section of a city.

Find a concrete tilt-up style building or any building used for manufacturing. These should have walls and floors which are 20 inches thick.

If you can't access the building, take a pick and shovel beside the building and dig up the landscaping beside the building. Dig down ten feet and make a trench ten feet long, ramping up to grade.

Next, tunnel under the building, and go in beyond the wall, then dig up to the foundation. Work on it and in a week you can make a ten by ten chamber.

This shelter won't be the best, but it will work for a few months.

If you can access the building,drive your car inside and close the doors. Move furniture to a windowless corner on the bottom floor or basement or parking structure. Improvise a shelter roof and walls, about four feet thick. Find tools to
raid the vending machines, take a waste basket and liners for a toilet, scrounge toilet paper, files computer printouts, etc. A waste basket and a clean liner will hold drinking water.

Lowes, Home Depot, or any contractor store will have hollow-block, sand, lumber, plywood, tools, all you need for shelter.

Build in the store. Make a wall with hollow-block, about two blocks thick. Build shelter seven by seven by seven. Allow for an opening.
fill the blocks alternating with gravel and sand.
Lay 2x4s on top, then plywood, and cover with 36 inches of rock, gravel and sand. Berm sand up against the outside walls and build a block wall about three feet from the entrance to block radiation.

Of course if you think you have time this week, you can build something in your backyard and stock it with supplies.

There are a variety of other shelter designs, and other very useful tips (like how to build a fallout meter from stuff laying around the average home) in this document:


http://www.nukepills.com/docs/nuclear_war_survival_skills.pdf

If you happen to have an in-ground concrete pool:
Drain it, then stack truck tires all around it, creating walls. Fill them with dirt, sand gravel, whatever you can find. Use powerline poles or timbers as rafters. on top of these place plexiglass or plywood with a large tarp covering the wood, then cover with 36" of dirt.

A lot of in-ground concrete pools have a ramp, which will be very convenient for you while stocking it with supplies. Use a hand truck or wagon to make things easier. If you have no ramp, you can make one using cinderblocks and a lot of concrete mix.

Halcitrons' post sounds as tho it came right from the pages of the old Civil Defense Playbook of the 1960s and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Pickup a copy of NUCLEAR WAR SURVIVAL SKILLS by Cresson Kearny. This book has a wealth of knowledge.