The Cold War Museum Crisis fallout shelter
I arrived in Prague from a visit to Police Kolín and had 4 hours until the next event. I go out of necessity to the toilet of the JALTA hotel on Wenceslas Square, in the lobby there is a model SNB officer standing as if cut out from the totalitarian era. I asked him: "Where on earth did you come from?" He was a guide to the civil defence bunker from the time of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. I recommend to see the PHOTOGALLERY.
There were nine of us - four Romanian women, three Romanians, supplemented by the guide and me. The interpretation in English lasted 75 min. Great, full of details, with the guide answering 
knowledgeably every question of the visitors. It was also quite action-packed, where we could climb through the emergency exit, or operate the hand-powered air pump. 
Tours for Czechs don't happen very often, but they should. Occasionally schools come along, where the tour programme is appropriately tailored to the age of the schoolchildren. It's similar to the Museum of Communism near Republic Square - especially for foreign tourists, where most of the public doesn't know about it. With media promotion, there would certainly be a lot of interest. By the way, the guide is Ukrainian, speaks perfect English and now is improving his Czech. When will the public see the Museum of Totalitarianism in Uherské Hradiště, in the former prison where political prisoners were tortured and died in the 1950s? Below is a recent article on the current system of population protection. It was published on the same day I visited the bunker under Yalta? There are no coincidences. JŠ
***
The Czech Republic's population protection system has a number of shortcomings, according to the SAO.
The system of population protection in the Czech Republic has a number of fundamental shortcomings, people are not sufficiently informed, masks and shelters are missing. The Supreme Audit Office (SAO) said this in a press release today. According to the Interior Ministry, the conclusions are biased. The Czech Republic's public protection system is considered one of the most robust and best prepared in the EU, the ministry said in response. The SAO audited CZK 721 million spent by the ministries of the Interior (MoI) and Health (MoH) to prepare for crisis situations. The auditors accuse the Interior Ministry of failing to provide a sufficient number of individual protection devices, such as masks and protective suits, or to complete the replacement of rotating sirens after 20 years, or to launch a planned web portal for the public. "The number of permanent shelters in the country has decreased by 32 percent since 2010. This situation should have been addressed by legislative changes, but the Ministry of Interior has not yet initiated them," the SAO said. The Interior Ministry disagrees with the auditors' conclusions. According to Interior Ministry spokeswoman Klára Dlubalová, since the audited period ended in 2021, many of the findings are now in the past. ČRo 27.3.2023
Read more...