Annandale High School has a secret chamber
By Shane Gomez
Annandale High School has a secret underground chamber that stems from its establishment in 1954, the height of the Cold War.
That history lives on in the school’s nuclear age iconography, like its mascot, the Atoms, red and white colors, and newspaper, the A-Blast.
Annandale also has a lesser-known feature from that era – a bomb shelter, offering a safe space during a nuclear attack.
The school was constructed during a period of surging tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, when nuclear war seemed imminent. Annandale is only about 13 miles from Washington, D.C., which was considered a prime target.
During that time, schools in Fairfax County also held weekly nuclear raid drills where students practiced “duck and cover” exercises.
The bomb shelter entrance, covered by a metal grate, is located at the front of the school.
An administrator used a key to open the grate and let an Annandale Today reporter take a look. A ladder leads down to a small vestibule filled with cobwebs, mud, and trash. There’s a red door that opens to the actual shelter.
The administrator couldn’t remember the last time someone went inside the shelter, which was too dirty for us to enter.
During the Cold War, it was common for schools to have bomb shelters. They are centrally located, easy to find, and filled with large spaces, making them logical locations.
At the time, the Virginia Board of Education urged school divisions, including Fairfax County, to include shelters when building new schools.
When Westgate Elementary School was built in 1968 in the Tysons area, it was designed in partnership with the U.S. Office of Civil Defense for use as a fallout shelter.
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Ravensworth Elementary School, in Springfield, received plans from the school board in 1962 to include a basement-level bomb shelter, but the plans were later scrapped.
It is unclear what other schools in Fairfax County were constructed with bomb shelters. The records might have been lost or forgotten. Many of them were repurposed as boiler rooms or storage areas.
In addition to the underground bomb shelter, Annandale High School has at least one other smaller bomb shelter, located inside the school, that was converted into storage space.
Jonathan York, who taught social studies at Annandale for 25 years and now works as a substitute, used to show his students both bomb shelters. He said students would always comment on how small the shelters were.
“I said priority one is to save the teachers; we have plenty of kids,” York joked.
Shane Gomez is Annandale Today’s summer intern.
Annandale High School is the oldest high school in Fairfax County on its original site. So you’d have to look for old school buildings no longer used by FCPS. Likewise Washington – Liberty HS in Arlington could have had one but that school was rebuilt. When I attended Annandale in the early 70s, we had the CD air raid siren, but nothing else related to the Cold War. AHS class of 1975.
We had air raid drills in elementary school, but we went out in the hall instead of duck and cover.
George Washington middle school in Alexandria has a bomb shelter, it was used has the book room in the late 90’s. The old TC Williams planetarium and locker rooms were also bomb shelters; I don’t think either would have actually provided protection from a nuclear bomb, beyond maybe not vaporizing. But the fallout would have gotten you.