bomb shelters

[Ickie]

I am watching serect passages tv show and it is about bomb shelters, and boy do i have a story.

I use to own a construction company in the 80's and one day I got the call to take out a bomb shelter and I was the low bidder, of $5000.

this was built in the 50's and no building permit.
It had a steel door to a tunnel in basement going to the bomb shelter, and it looked like solid cement, about 16' by 16' by 6 feet deep. it was below ground level so no body knew it was there.

the old guy died and the family was selling the house and the building inspecter said it had to go before the sale.

I and my 3 man crew loaded up the dump truck and back hoe and I rented the biggest jack hammer I could get, and it was powered by a v-8 motor.

when i got there at 8 am no-one was home so i had my crew dig off the top soil to uncover this bomb shelter and I got on top of it in the middle with the jack hammer and hit the trigger, and down I went, lol. This was the fastest demo I ever did, if I had only known I could have taken this out tith a hammer.

it turned out to be made out of 6" cement blocks with mortor plastered on the walls and the top was made of 3" concrete with no rebar.

I had one of my guys remove the steel door and fill the hole with cement blocks and by noon I had the entire structure dug out and loaded on my dump truck.
On the way back from the dump I got a full load (10 yards) of fill dirt.

when the people got there at 4 pm I was sitting in the shade after we layed down the sod to cover the hole. Boy was the owners shocked by our speed, as they were quotted up to 10 days for the demo work and up to $15,000 for the total job.
I took pictures and rushed them down to the 1 hour photo place, (Henrys old place, lol) to give the building inspecter and family to get paid.

They and I had a laugh because if this was ever needed they family would have parished, lol.

[Daveroo]

lol....maybe would have withstood a flour bomb?,,,i was part of digging up one myself,,,i was a plumber/firefighter but i got loaned oout to a family friend Don Robinson construction at slow plumbing times so i had good income,anyway....we went to remove one and it turned out that the old guy who built it had taken a large 2 stage septic tank,,pumped it out,took the redwood barrier out,put a concrete lid on it with a "pulpit like thing with a door and ladder to get in and wired it....cept he put the generator inside and a 60 gallon fuel tank,( i dont know how long he planed to be there)there were still shelves of cans with the labels long rotted off,it stunk to high heaven...did i say this had been a working septic tank at one time?..he had a toilet with a bucket and a septic grinder/pumpp going into the old leach field pipe..lol..that cracked me up...but at least he was thinking realistically...while we were starting..we heard KAAAAPOOOOWWWWWW and we got covered with this sticky white ...yuck....turned out an old can of goats milk exploded ...funny thing about that....we then went to the shanghia bar in old town auburn ( the john travolta movie Phenominom was filmed there) were sitting at the bar with a few cold ones and the bartender is half laughing and half complaining about the smell and KAPOOOWWWW and an old can of goats milk that was on the junk shlef about the back bar explodes and gets all over the place...was funny as hell....

[Jagdflieger]

That was a fast $5,000 back when a doller meant a little more. Great coup!

I think that most of the "bomb shelters" made during the 50s and 60s (how many remember the Cuban Missle Crisis?) were actually fallout shelters. The goal of course was to get under ground with a supply of food and water in order to let the radioactivity blow away or cool off after a nuclear strike.

Very few shelters, including Cheyenne Mountain (NORAD HQ) can really withstand a direct or close proximity ground burst nuclear warhead. Airburst munitions don't really shock much below the earth, so that old shelter may just have served its purpose had the balloon gone up.

Thank the Lord we never had to find out.

During the Cold War, much military training revolved around nuclear, bilolgical and chemical warfare. We had very sophisticated fallout models and numerous field expedient shelter designs and protective clothing. Most of you old Cold War warriors will no doubt remember sweating in your MOPP suits and masks.

Here is a map of the suspected Soviet targets in the USA. Fallout from each strike would have drifted, for the most part, from the SW to the NE with normal weather patterns.

[SpitXIV]

Just curious, what makes goat milk explode? is it old age. Botulism?

[Daveroo]

Just curious, what makes goat milk explode? is it old age. Botulism?

age/heat// and i have no clue..but it was really strange it would happen twice in one day to the same crew of guys in two differant places....

[n4gix]

Back in the mid 50's when my dad was teaching at the FAA Academy we lived in Oklahoma City. Our house had a shelter in the back yard that did double-duty as both a fallout shelter and a tornado shelter.

Over a six year period we only used it about eight times as a tornado shelter. :ernae: