Posted on 03/21/2006 12:38:10 PM PST by neverdem
For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.
City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.
To step inside the vault — a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes — is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.
Several historians said yesterday that the find was exceptional, in part because many of the cardboard boxes of supplies were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.
"Civil defense agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country during the 1950's and stocking them with supplies of food and water and whatnot," said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale and a pre-eminent scholar of the cold war.
"Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago. It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact — one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The Department of Transportation, which controls the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
those crackers are already on e bay
Why didn't FEMA know about this? Isn't this a waste of tax payer money? Impeach Bush, Impeach Bush, Chaney knew about it all along and kept it a secret. (tongue in cheek)
it shows you how frequent the bridge inspections are - that they just found these.
When they cleaned out the bomb shelter beneath our school back in the seventies, they distributed those crackers - and they were great!
Better than any cracker I've had since.
Right you are, but from another shelter:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Cold-War-Era-1962-CIVIL-DEFENSE-SURVIVAL-CRACKERS-TIN_W0QQitemZ6550648979QQcategoryZ588QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Very interesting!
60 Minutes did a piece on the NYPD CTU on Sunday. They seemed to indicate that divers search the bridges every day.
Of course, that was 60 Minutes, so believe what you like.
NYPD I trust, but the NYC DOT is another story.
I recall reading years ago that civil defense supplies were stored in the bridge pylons. If they asked me, I would have told them.
This was the CTU of NYPD.
Thats not all.And it happened all over the country.
"seemed"
Typical NYT spin. I guess it was just a figment of our fevered imaginations fueled by our "inordinate fear of communism". To quote one of the Slimes favorite Presidents, James Earl "Mr. Peanut" Carter.
Never mind the nuclear weapons already deployed on the Soviet subs we were hassling and which were ordered prepared for firing in at least one case. Never mind the tactical battlefield nukes the Soviets had already deployed, with authorization for their use should the US invade Cuba. All just a figment I guess.
Doesn't this just boggle the mind that this has been unnoticed for decades?
The nuns rounded us up and sent us home early that day.
Everything was strangely quiet, VERY little traffic on the streets as I remember.
My mother was ironing, like she did when she got nervous.
What a time it was.
Thanks for the link.
ping
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