Two general types of information were needed to make good decisions in a nuclear crisis: military information and civilian information. The Emergency Government Situation Centre, or EMGOVSITCEN for short, handled the civilian side of communications. Personnel stationed in EMGOVSITCEN tracked the damage and fallout of a nuclear attack on Canada using charts, maps, video monitoring and overhead cameras.

The room is divided into two areas: the Infrastructure Assessment area, and the Casualty and Damage Assessment area.

Staff would have assessed infrastructure during and after a nuclear attack, keeping up to speed with conditions of transportation systems, agriculture, telecoms, housing, hospitals, power sources, and industry. Reports came in from officials staffed within regional and municipal Diefenbunkers within each province, and nuclear fallout was recorded by Nuclear Detonation Detection System sites across the country. The status board labeled the EMGOV Facilities Board shows the activation status of other regional bunkers across Canada.

The Casualty and Damage Assessment area monitored the impact and result of attacks on the civilian population using the backlit status map. This map pinpointed the location of nuclear explosions using NORAD Command reports.

The Alert Status Board adjacent to the map would have been kept up to date during a crisis. An overhead camera points to the large map with a plastic overlay, which tracks the travel direction of radioactive fallout. All of the information would have been sent to monitors throughout the Bunker, including the War Cabinet.

Original phones in this room had a clamp on the handset. This helped secure the phone lines against shock waves initiated by a nearby nuclear bomb blast.

Listen to David Peters of Emergency Preparedness Canada describe emergency drills conducted in this room:

“…We managed to have a few exercises, mostly last thing, I think it was 36 to 48 hours in which we would practice what would happen in the event of a nuclear war in Canada. We’re simply trying to practice the flow of information. Because our job was basically flowing information from outside sources, and from sources we had here, analyzing it, collating it, and presenting it to Cabinet so Cabinet can make whatever decisions it had to make at the time.”