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Nuke-Proof Bunker Turns Out Not Waterproof
An anonymous reader writes "The AP reports on the opening of a vault in Tulsa, OK which was designed to withstand a nuclear attack by the Russians. 50 years ago they put a Plymouth Belvedere in the vault to preserve it so that we could get a good look at it in the (for that time) magical year of 2007. Unfortunately it turns out that the vault wasn't even waterproof. The once beautiful car is now a literal rust bucket."
Now gimme a break. That was not part of the requirement specifications!
Well, at least people can still duck and cover if there's a nuclear attack. Hooray for worthless advice...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
It could have been worse - it could have been a 197o's Ford, in which case all that would have been left would have been the tires and a lump of iron oxide.
It was built to shelter people against radiation, not water. And? How did it not work? Did anyone die from radiation in the area?
See how good it works!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
BTW, the Cold War systems were decommissioned about a decade ago. In the early 1990's the louvers needed painting, so they were removed from building, shipped to someplace (rumor said Texas), painted and then reinstalled. A couple of years later they were removed for good.
The British kids' TV show, Blue Peter had the same thing happen with one of the "time capsules" they buried on TV. When they dug it up again with great ceremony 16 years later, water had got in and it was a soggy mess.
Not sure what the point of it was anyway; 16 years isn't that long unless you're like 6 years old when it's being dug up- seems pretty contrived and pointless to me.
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Make us think they are going to nuke us and then launch a surprise attack with water pistols.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I'm waiting for a nuclear engineer to show up and tell us how water can get in, but gamma particles can not. This is not a jab at nuclear engineers, I'm truly interested.
I think the moral of this story is that archiving anything, even if it seems durable, is hard. Now, how confident do you feel about those backup tapes that are in the closet down the hall? How much moisture is getting to them just from the humidity in the air?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
the story should be looked at carefully by whoever designs nuclear or chemical wast storage areas. 50 years is nothing in comparison to the time frames deposits should last. In this case, there was the unexpected puncture of the hull, which was devastating. It shows how difficult it is to see all aspects of the problem.
The USA bluffed them into spending their way into bankruptcy and collapse with all these stories of super weapons and facilities that the USA was supposed to be developing and the Russians had to match dollar for ruble. Well it turns out most of these facilities were junk just like Star Wars and the manned space program. The Russians had the more reliable manned program (Soyuz) all along but got demoralized from all the talk about how capitalism can make everything cheaper and better and they just gave up. I guess we should thank Hollywood for our victory in the Cold War more than the Pentagon or the White House.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Even if the container were waterproof the car would still rust if the humidity wasn't controlled.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
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The stock market was abuzz last week, seeing lots of activity in the rust futures markets.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I read that it had been treated with cosmoline. That's a rust preventative that's often used to preserve military firearms that are being kept in long-term storage.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That's true but 50 years ago rust wasn't very well understood, in America. Most things were still being built from wood at the time. It wasn't until the American elite began to learn European languages and the Queens English sufficiently well to make themselves understood abroad that they were able to make the most of the cultural and scientific aid on offer from Europe and learn about things like rust.
You see this is what happens when you get too many water chips. Vault 8, anyone?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Ive remember hearing stories about this car growing up. It was really neat watching Ms. Belvedere (thats what we call her) finally come out of the ground. It was a little disappointing to see her rusted out, but it gives her character. They took guesses at what the population would be in 2007, and the very first guess was 388,000, and the population figure they are using is 380,000. That was one hell of a guess. Whoever guesses closest wins the car. I hope they give it to a museum. She belongs to all of Tulsa. Take that Oklahoma City!!!
The story says it is a "literal rust bucket". No, it is not a literal rust bucket, it is a FIGURATIVE rust bucket. This is a literal rust bucket. Actually, no, that isn't a literal rust bucket either, that is a literal rusty bucket, a literal rust bucket would be a bucket which holds rust.
Please clarify. Since you use the term 'literal', do you mean that the car is not a bucket containing rust, or a metal bucket which has become rusty?
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
in 1972 there was somne excavation work being done 30 ft away, they said back then that they thought they might have damaged it but the city did nothing to fix the problem.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
In Soviet Russia, bunkers are waterproof but not nuke-proof.
is that they put the gasoline in there because they thought the world would be so advanced in the 21st century that we would've moved way beyond that. :P
I'm sure we could find the same car (same model, same year) that's been used every day since the 50s in better shape! No joke.
...pay a visit to the Minuteman Missle National Historic Site in South Dakota. They offer tours of an underground Minuteman Delta launch bunker on a appointment-only basis, 6-8 to a group. The bunker itself, built in the 60's, is actually an air-tight, climate-controlled concrete capsule suspended on giant shock absorbers about 150 feet below the surface. The only entrance into the capsule is via a 5-ton vault door that could be opened and shut in under a minute. It provides a fascinating insight into the Cold War and the level of redundancy that was in place to ensure that if a launch was ordered, it would happen (for instance, launch orders would be given to a number of different launch sites simultaneously, so no launch site personnel would be aware of who actually launched a missle).
Interesting story: There was an "emergency egress" hatch in the capsule that led to the surface through a corrugated pipe. There were only a few problems: The hatch door weighed over 200 pounds and dropped down from the ceiling, ensuring the first one out would probably be the last one out. And the government was afraid the Russkies knew where the egress points were on the surface, so the government poured a parking lot over it. Only problem was they failed to tell the launch controllers that their "emergency egress" system led to the underside of a parking lot. This was all top-secret stuff, never came to light until after the sites were decommissioned and dismantled.
It's a contest! Some lucky person actually gets to win that old, rusted-out bucket!
From the award letter:
CONGRATULATIONS! You have won this 1957 Plymouth Belvedere, stored in a time capsule 50 years ago! (See picture)
Please make arrangements to have the vehicle moved off of city property as soon as possible or we will have to start fining you $50/day.
The vehicles one would expect in a post-apocalyptic dystopia are those at the top of the (performance*maintainability) curve _at_ the time of the _apocalyptic event_.
Bicycles... man what a depressing movie that would be.
I saw the car buried and now I've seen it dug back up. It was built to withstand a nuclear bomb because fear of nuclear war was on everyone's mind in 1957, but it was never intended to be anything other than a vault for the car. At the time Tulsa's largest employer was Douglas Aircraft, building Boeing B-47 bombers for the Strategic Air Command, so Tulsa folks considered the town a prime target for a nuke attack.
The car was buried in a spirit of celebration of Oklahoma's 50th anniversary of statehood, but I think in many people's minds, they thought it might be the only thing that survived the unavoidable nuclear attack. (What a legacy, eh?)
As far as the bunker not being very good protection against a nuke, we school kiddies of the time were being taught to duck under our desks and cover our necks when we saw the flash of a nuclear explosion. If THAT was good enough... just imagine how cool a concrete-covered bunker was.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
I'm amazed not one slashdotter here realized the point I'm about to make.
Most revisionist historians often reflect on the fear that Americans had of being obliterated in the 1950s from a nuclear catastrophe. For a midwestern American city in 1957 to have a contest to determine how many would be living there in 50 years and especially predict the winning guesser (or closest of kin) would be alive in 50 demonstrates there was hope for a future.
As for records archiving, as long as the net stays up we have a global backup system, because we can keep leapfrogging technologies, there is no start and stop point where we change everything all at once. Static archiving gets into troubles because of entropy, stuff just starts falling apart. If the whole net ever goes down hard globally for some years, we would lose a lot of data. Current paper isn't that good, photos fade fast on most media, plastic disk based isn't that good, harddrives aren't that good, etc. Each has a few good points and some bad points, but none of them are really designed for centuries or millenia AFAIK. A few years or dozens of years anecdotal from someone with their pet favorite media does not equal centuries or millenia. It's a guess and a crapshoot really we just don't know. We've already lost just a ton of old filmed media, TV shows and movies, from the last century, film just didn't cut it long haul, requires a lot of expensive care, and we need something that doesn't require expensive and elaborate care, and digital format requires the media to be matched to the hardware it was designed for, that has to be archived as well, and kept in perfect operating conditions.
We are a society that lost our freaking moon tapes! And even before that it had gotten to the point only a few existing pieces of hardware could even access the stuff, and that was some pretty important records. And that is *short term* historically speaking. Real short term.
We have to keep human nature involved in this discussion as well as just the nuts and bolts of archiving. Stuff gets lost or stolen and artificially lost or just gets wet or forgotten about and starts to just rot away. We have right now a fastfood society, nothing is considered all that important. We pay lip service to archiving, sure, I'll admit that, but really, it's a symptom of our short term profits business world and throw away society.
Then you have to consider, exactly what is really worth saving for that long anyway? All of it, all of everything we do, all the records? It's gonna get pretty expensive eventually if we keep trying to do that.
Ecclesiastes battle!
"I returned and saw under the nuclear winter, that the nukes are not to the wise, nor the silos to the rich, nor the bunkers to the smart, nor testing areas to the islanders; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
that the ten gallons of gasoline left in the bunker is worth more than the car!