An unfortunately-prescient guide to UofT’s best fallout shelters
You know, I wrote this pitch call as a funny play on the Wasteland theme, but with recent political developments, it’s become more potentially relevant than I’d anticipated. If it’s 2027 and you’re currently using this newspaper to shield your head from the irradiated soot-rain of what was once Toronto, then feel free to put the blame on me for presaging all this – in all likelihood, I’ll be dead by then. Anyway, just in case things haven’t gotten quite that bad yet, here are a few of the best places on campus for weathering a nuclear war.
Burwash Dining Hall
One of your most important priorities in selecting a fallout shelter is ensuring that you have a large supply of uncontaminated food and a way to protect it. Luckily, Burwash Dining Hall has you covered, with a selection of food so bizarre and off-putting that none of the various threats of a nuclear war are likely to change it for the worse whatsoever. Creeping radiation? No match for whatever cutting-edge chemicals make up the undifferentiated cinderblock of so-called scrambled eggs in the Burwash breakfast trays. Roving bandits? Just pelt them with a rock-hard samosa or impede their path with the gallons of grease from the pizza station. Giant radioactive cockroaches? They’ll quickly be outcompeted by the even larger and more aggressive cockroaches that live there already. Burwash Dining Hall has all the supplies that an intrepid wasteland survivor could ever need, provided you have the capacity to choke them down yourself.
Varsity Centre Sports Bubble
Though it may look like the Michelin Man’s left testicle, the white dome erected on Varsity Field throughout the winter is a great potential option for nuclear survival. It has filtered air, a great deal of athletic equipment to stay fit and ready for danger, and it may even boast the potential for farming if you can find any dirt left under the horrible, knee-skinning rubber turf. Taking up residence in the Sports Bubble post-nuclear-war may be difficult, though: rumors across the wasteland tell of a pack of horrendous mutants, devoid of higher thought and motivated only by a thirst for violence, that have claimed the Bubble as their territory. But once you get rid of the student athletes, living there should be great!
Robarts Library
Robarts may well be a great place to ride out a nuclear war, given it already looks like it was built to survive one. The austere concrete gamefowl is currently a bit of a stain on our skyline, but if there’s no skyline left to stain, its thickset stolidness may well make it an effective and imposing base of operations. Furthermore, you’ll have enough entertainment to last you the rest of your life, provided you consider entertainment to be the perusal of ancient ecclesiastical manuals, dry social theory, and biographies of other biographers. Making Robarts your stronghold in the wasteland provides you with the opportunity to be the steward of one of the world’s largest remaining collections of knowledge – or to use it as kindling/toilet paper if you’re differently inclined.
Mississauga Campus
Ruins everywhere the eye can see. Gaunt, ashen figures picking their way through the destruction. A cloud of toxic despair hanging over the populace. All hope lost. Such was the condition of UofT’s Mississauga campus before the nuclear bomb hit. After, however, it may well be a great place to go! The remaining survivors will likely greet an emissary of the Great City as a messiah, and no band of rogues or tyrannical neo-government will ever think to look for anything valuable in the boroughs. Sometimes, survival comes at a great cost, and one of those costs might well be moving more than forty minutes away from downtown. Just make sure to avoid the Gardiner Expressway on the way there, even if it wasn’t in the blast zone – trust me.
