Posted on 05/04/2013 4:49:47 PM PDT by dynachrome
For more than a decade after they moved into their house in Neenah, Wisconsin, the Zwick family knew they had a Cold War bunker in their backyard.
It was not until 2010 that anyone thought to open the heavy steel hatch, climb down the ladder and explore the 8-foot-by-10-foot chamber that the home's previous owner had built to protect his family from a nuclear attack.
Floating in five feet of water that had seemed into the bunker were sealed U.S. Army boxed packed with all of the supplies a family would need to survive two weeks underground.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I ate of it out of several cans over a period of months, and did have friends sample it.
Canned foods don’t make you sick, they can only change in flavor and quality and nutrition, but they are still safe to eat, with only the normal canned food rules applying, in other words, as long as the can is still sealed and not bulging, eat it.
We have already had one atomic war.
WWII started as a conventional war, but ended as a nuclear war.
Dunno man, I'd have gone from the settlement meeting to Lowe's for some jumbo bolt cutters and a sawz-all. And a pump and some tubing.
Having eaten startlingly old C-Rations in the early Eighties- I concur. They only made me think I was sick.
LOVE that movie!
I'm not against having a bunker on the property.
I just would have inspected it before I bought. And figured out if that floor space worked into the tax assessment.
/johnny
Yeah it was actually kind of a cool movie.
“It’s unknown why the past owner decided he needed to store a phone directory in his fallout shelter”
“I bet your list knows why!”
I have many, save every large phone book. A relative looked under a sink in a bathroom in my house, saw stacked phone books and said, “We can throw these away.” I said, “Toilet Paper”. He rolled his eyes and shut the cabinet door.
Keep a bucket of bleach water nearby to sanitize it.
But that's just me.
/johnny
I like C-rations and preferred them to the early MREs, which have since improved, during the Vietnam war we were eating c-ration meals with cigarettes with them.
This particular shelter was a radiation shelter and not a bomb blast shelter. You only need to woory about being asphyxiated and/or roasted dead or alive in a shelter when the shelter is located within the fire zone which is a few miles or so of the hypocenter of the nuclear explosion. Any shelter located beyond the very close proximity of the blast and fire effects will not be affected by the loss of oxygen or extreme heat. The radiation shelter was intended to provide enough mass to stop harmful radiation and radiation contaminated air from reaching the occupants of the shelter during the two week period required for these radioactive contaminants to decay to relatively safer leveels.
The auntor/s of the article demonstrated some tremendous ignorance in their implied criticism of the need for a shelter so far from the population centers in Milwaukee and Chicago. The surgeon owner of the shelter knew full well the greatest danger was posed by radioactivee fallout coming from the Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases and other military and commercial targets located westwards and southwestwards frrom the shelter location in Wisconsin. The SAC bomber bases and SAC missile silos hundreds of miles away in those directions were upwind of the Wisconsin shelter. The radioactivee fallout from the attacks on those targets would have fallen out all over wisconsin. The only question is whether or not the shelter had been built and equipped properly to filter the air supply to remove radioactive contaminants and whether or not the steel plate door had the necessary thickness to stop the radiation?
a whole 2 weeks supplies .. they were a family of optometrists , no doubt. .. uhh optimists.
I would have tried the choco-mint life savers. I’m old enough to remember the 60’s, but don’t remember that flavor
Just hearing/seeing those initials immediately makes me think of the stormtroopers kicking in innocent people’s doors. Wonder if they came in like Ninjas and shot the dumb people’s dog.
That's okay, too. I don't understand people who think there's only one way to do something. With survival in mind, I have at least three ways to accomplish most everything. I haven't searched for a sponge on a stick. That would be interesting if I found one. Might find one in bathroom supplies to be used for cleaning the body (not that part of the body) or cleaning the tub.
When I was a kid, a neighbor was on the $64,000 Question TV quiz show. He won $32,000, then spent what the government didn’t take on a fallout shelter.
What a waste of money!
I wonder if it’s still there, or if the people who live there now know what it was?
Back then, I didn’t really care. Food was food; if it kept me on my feet- good to go.
Things are different now- going to go buy some terrific roadside barbecue tomorrow morning for some friends as a surprise.
Don’t live hard unless I have to. :-)
It doubles as a root cellar for storing veggies from the garden, and for a tornado shelter.
/johnny
/johnny
Yep, I guess it wasn’t really “liking” them as much as needing them, I got married in the Army and lived off base before the military started paying well, and c-rations also supplemented my wife and mines home diet.
Just like MREs, they don’t taste as good at home sitting on a couch, under electric lights and with wall to wall carpeting, as they do when you are burning up calories out in the field and sitting on a log.
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