Sunday, December 30, 2007

Fallout shelter

So the local Reno myth is that under the downtown branch of the library, there is a fallout shelter that's been there since the building was built. Turns out it's true, and Mich and I were lucky enough to get to go on a little tour of it, led by my friend and coworker, Marc.

In the back corner of the Periodicals section downstairs, there's a grate in the wall. In fact, the grate is a door leading into the fallout shelter.



There's a small "lobby" kind of area just inside the door, then you climb down a ladder to the main part of the shelter. Here's someone getting ready to climb down.



Once down, the shelter is basically two long concrete ventilation tunnels. Pretty windy inside them, too. Here's Mich sitting in one:



And a view down one of the tunnels:



Then back up on the other side of the ladders, there are some Civil Defense supply barrels stacked up. Marc hopped up and showed us some.



Many of the barrels were water containers like the one that Marc is holding, but some had this great logo on them:



There were also quite a few tins of "carbohydrate supplement", which was simply really old hard candy. Marc said that they had tried some last time they went down, and they were disgusting.



A couple more pictures of the entrance/exit, from inside and out...





Anyway, thanks again to Marc for showing us around down there; it was pretty interesting!

1 comment:

SnowLeopard said...

It sure looks creepy down there! And cold. And claustrophobic. How was it windy? Was there an outside connecting grate as well? It would be pretty scary to get stuck down there with no lights...