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When Gail Bowen moved into her Old Lakeview home in 1979, she assumed the small shed in the backyard was just another storage building.

But she soon realized that shed was a piece of Regina history.

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Inside, a flight of stairs led to an underground fallout shelter, a bunker built to protect people from a nuclear attack. It was likely constructed during the height of the Cold War, in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were high. Since Canada was in the flight path of nuclear weapons, there were fears the country could be hit.

Bowen has heard rumblings over time about how her shelter was constructed.

“The neighbours in the back said the fellow who was building this was quite secretive, and they assumed he was putting in a swimming pool,” said Bowen. “But then of course it got much deeper and larger.”

She remembers the first time she and her three children went to investigate it.