Biggest Problem with Underground Shelter Industry Revealed

(Newswire.net — June 27, 2016) Garland, Texas — Norad Shelter Systems LLC discusses the biggest problem with the underground shelter industry. The company specializes in the design, engineering and installation of the Norad S Series underground shelters, which is based on the designs of Walton McCarthy—a mechanical engineer with over 38 years of experience in underground shelter engineering and manufacturing.

According to the company, the biggest problem with the underground shelter industry is that the manufacturers do not have performance data published about their shelters, nor are their shelters manufactured to any engineering standards. Norad Shelter says that few manufacturers know how much radiation enters a shelter at a given distance from ground zero for various size weapons. This concept is referred to as the Total Rems in Shelter or TRS.

Norad Shelter Systems (www.noradshelters.com) provides a TRS of 2-10 as an example, indicating that radiation from overhead, entranceways, and ducting will result in approximately 2 rems of gamma and/or neutron radiation entering the shelter at the 10 psi range for a given size weapon.

Unlike the majority of products in the industry, Norad Shelter Systems’ products all meet the standards established in the book ‘Principles of Protection: U.S. Handbook of NBC Weapon Fundamentals and Shelter Engineering Standards, 6^th Edition 2013, Brown Books’, written by Walton McCarthy himself. The book sets the definitive design standards for underground biological, chemical, nuclear and EMP shelter engineering.

McCarthy’s book was written with the help of experts from the US Department of Energy, US Department of Defense, Strategic Applications International, Nuclear Engineering Laboratory from the University of Illinois, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Chemical Division of Edgewood Arsenal, Brookhaven National Laboratory, US Defense Nuclear Agency and the US National Bureau of Standards. It is available on Amazon and has been used by architects and engineers around the world for over 20 years now. There are numerous other standards listed in the book for buoyancy, seismic joints, shelter duration, air manifolds, and many more.

Norad Shelter Systems offers a 30-year structural warranty on their underground shelters. Most shelter manufacturers do not state the warranty on their website, and when customers inquire, it reportedly is a 30-year warranty against workmanship and materials—which is not a warranty since it is the manufacturer who defines both workmanship and materials.

The company’s major market has been military shelters but they can be classified as nuclear shelters, bomb shelters, biological shelters, underground survival shelters, EMP shelters, Emergency Operations Shelters, tornado shelters, or community shelters for schools. Community shelters for schools is a major market since the Norad designs do not use any concrete.