Around 100,000 such single-home emergency air-raid shelters exist in the country. Homeowners are required to keep them available for emergencies as part of the country’s civil protection strategy.
However, Swiss public broadcaster SRF revealedExternal link on Friday that the federal government and cantons would like to phase them out due to the high cost of retrofitting them to remain operational.
The unpublished “Protective Structures Concept” of the Federal Office for Civil Protection states that private bunkers with fewer than seven spaces should be abolished. The ventilation units for such installations are over four decades old and have to be changed. However, these units are no longer manufactured and the cost of retrofitting the bunkers outweighs the benefits, according to the document. In addition, it was felt that there were too many of these small shelters for the civil defence force to manage in case of an emergency.
Switzerland has had a unique ‘shelters for all’ policy since 1963, at the height of the Cold War. Every person in the country must have a spot in a bunker in case of some kind of catastrophe. Bunkers either have to be built underneath homes and blocks of flats, or the building owner has to pay the local authorities for a spot in a public shelter.
For around 20 years, shelters have no longer had to be built in new houses. In principle, they are now only required for new buildings with 38 rooms or more.
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“Why on earth have you got a reinforced steel door in your cellar?” The amazement of a visiting Italian friend is easy to understand. He has never been in the basement of a Swiss home. Cellar? Well, the room is half full of bottles of wine, old books, a freezer, unwanted clothes… but a cellar…
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