Michigan Is Far and Away the Nation’s Leader with Over 2000 Nuclear Fallout Shelters

There's both a positive and negative side to Michigan having an abundance of known fallout shelter locations. On the plus side, there may be room for a great number of people to seek shelter. But, on the other side of the coin, having so many shelters means the state may be seen as a potential target.

Fallout shelters have been a part of the American landscape since the Cold War of the 1950s. After those tensions cooled, many shelters have been forgotten, perhaps only remembered as a faded sign on a public building.

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Whether its a function of solid record keeping or a remnant of a building boom (pun not intended) of bomb shelters, Michigan has more, by a magnitude of scale than any other state.

The number crunching was shared on a subreddit of Reddit dedicated to maps showing the scale of Michigan's fallout shelters. Michigan leads the nation with over 2300 documented fallout shelters unsurprisingly clustered in the state's largest two metro regions around Detroit and Grand Rapids. The lowest number of known shelters is just 2 in a single state.

The map data comes from a site about Prepping and Survivalism known as TruePrepper.

READ MORE: Many Parts of Michigan are Totally Safe from a Nuclear Attack - Here's Where

What made Michigan such a hotbed for fallout shelters? Or as one Redditor asked, "What does Michigan know that the rest of us don’t?"

The Motor City's Legacy: Driving Fallout Shelter Development

The answer, likely not surprisingly, is the state's motor heritage. Not only passenger vehicles and engineering knowhow, but in wartime, many of the automakers transformed their plants to outfit the military. The US Army maintains a tank building facility in Warren near 12 Mile and Mound Road.

A Tale of Two Michigans: Shelter Distribution Across the State

There is a stark divide in the number of fallout shelters in the population centers of Lower Michigan compared to the northern parts of the state. North of US 10 in the Lower Peninsula, there are no documented fallout shelters anywhere other than Traverse City.

In the Upper Peninsula shelters are incredibly sparse with known locations only in Munising, Negaunee, Crystal Falls and the Houghton-Hancock area. None appear to exist in Marquette or other population centers like Sault Ste Marie, Iron Mountain, Ironwood or Menominee.

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While it's likely the fallout shelters are remnants from another era and are not maintained to be particularly useful in a civil defense emergency, perhaps there's some comfort in at least knowing they exist.