National Fallout Shelter Program - The Community Fallout Shelter Plan

With the surveying, marking and stocking of shelters all around the country, communities had to have a way to inform the citizens of where their nearest Fallout Shelter was located. The Office Of Civil Defense devised the Community Shelter Plan, or CSP, to serve this purpose. Towns and cities all over the United States started publishing and distributing their CSPs to the public. Here is the Community Shelter Plan issued to the public by Dallas Texas Civil Defense as an example. Other CSPs I have from around the U.S. can be viewed by clicking the links at the top of the page.

The CSPs issued to the public were usually in the form of a small booklet or newspaper type publication. The CSPs that I have seen are in a few different formats. The newspaper type supplement seen here in the Dallas CSP and with the Fort Worth CSP is one type. Another type is the booklet format as with the Waco/McLennan County and Lane County CSPs. Another type is the fold out map style as with the many pamphlet type CSPs. The format depended on the size of the municipality covered by the CSP. Larger cities used the newspaper style, medium size cities used the booklet and small towns used the fold out maps style of CSP.

I have community shelter plans in my collection from towns as small as a few hundred people on up to large cities. For example, below is the Dallas County, Texas Community Shelter Plan. The standard CSP consists of maps of the county or town with shelter locations marked on the maps. The building name and addresses of the shelters are listed along with the map on the page. The main purpose of the CSP was to allocate people in areas of the community adjacent to shelters to specific shelters. You can see details of how the Dallas CSP is laid out below.

Dallas Community Fallout Shelter Plan Map - Area C

This map is one of 7 maps in the Dallas CSP and shows a typical example of how a community fallout shelter plan is laid out. The Dallas CSP has the county divided in to seven sections. This map shows the part of Dallas County where I grew up. The yellow highlighted sections of the map designate areas of the county covered by shelter spaces. In other words, if you lived in the yellow highlighted area you had a designated shelter you were to go to in case of attack. If you lived outside the yellow area you didn't have a designate community shelter to go too and were advised to improvise some type of Fallout Shelter in your home. On the map, the numbered red circles are the shelters. The Shelter List below shows the numbers with the name of the building with the shelter and the address. As far as I know all of these buildings that were designated as shelters, except one, are still there as of 2013.

At the bottom of the "Area C" page are "How To Use This Map" and the "Shelter List." I cropped them individually because the page was too large to scan at the time.

Dallas City-County Community Shelter Plan Engineering Report

This document is a copy of the original engineering report of the Dallas CSP. The entire process of putting together the Dallas CSP is explained in this report. The engineering firm used census data, traffic data and various other pieces of information to develop the CSP. The document is several hundered pages of maps and shelter lists and is about an inch think. It was from this report that the condensed booklet above was finally published. See PDF File Below.

In mid-2013 I finally got around to scanning the Dallas CSP Engineering Report and the publicly released Dallas CSP and put them into a PDF file format. The engineering report doesn't include the shelter location maps because they fold out to about double page size. The maps are very detailed and the shelter location numbers are barely visible so I didn't scan them. The public issued version I scanned for the PDF file is a scaled down greyscale copy of the original Dallas CSP. I'll try to get around to scanning the original color version eventually.

Dallas CSP Engineering Report PDF (Less Maps) 24Mb File

Public Issued Dallas CSP Black and White Copy PDF 13Mb File

DALLAS COUNTY COMMUNITY SHELTER PLAN (Early 1980s Release)

In the early 1980s the Dallas Emergency Preparedness office re-released the Dallas County CSP in a reworked format. Shelter locations weren't marked on the maps in this version of the CSP. Map areas were designated with shelters simply listed on the pages for those areas. This CSP must have been re-released due to FEMA's Crisis Relocation / shelter planning in the late 1970s - early 1980s. I don't have this CSP in PDF format like the early Dallas CSP. This later version of civil defense planning started in 1979 and is outlined in this document. FEMA State and Local Guide SLG 100/May 1990. This document is the revised 1990 version of FEMA CPG 1-7 originally published in April 1979. The PDF file is about 25 MB in file size.
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