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Three Caves Quarry, soon to become the United States biggest nuclear fallout shelter

For the first time in decades, the United States is refurbishing old nuclear fallout shelters, and building new ones. Well, sort of. In Alabama, officials are planning to pack 20,000 people into a massive abandoned mine in the event of nuclear armegeddon, but unlike the Cold War-era nuclear shelters, the new ones will not be stocked with food and water. It will be “bring your own everything.”

From AP :

In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation’s most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.

Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community’s shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the surrounding county.

Emergency planners in Huntsville - an out-of-the-way city best known as the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center - say the idea makes sense because radioactive fallout could be scattered for hundreds of miles if terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb.

“If Huntsville is in the blast zone, there’s not much we can do. But if it’s just fallout … shelters would absorb 90 percent of the radiation,” said longtime emergency management planner Kirk Paradise, whose Cold War expertise with fallout shelters led local leaders to renew Huntsville’s program.

Huntsville’s project, developed using $70,000 from a Homeland Security grant, goes against the grain because the United States essentially scrapped its national plan for fallout shelters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Congress cut off funding and the government published its last list of approved shelters at the end of 1992.

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Last mined in the early ’50s, the limestone quarry is dug 300 yards into the side of the mountain, with ceilings as high as 60 feet and 10 acres of floor space covered with jagged rocks. Jet-black in places with a year-round temperature of about 60 degrees, it has a colony of bats living in its highest reaches and baby stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

“It would be a little trying, but it’s better than the alternative,” said Andy Prewett, a manager with The Land Trust of Huntsville and North Alabama, a nonprofit preservation group that owns the mine and is making it available for free.

Unlike the fallout shelters set up during the Cold War, the new ones will not be stocked with water, food or other supplies. For survivors of a nuclear attack, it would be strictly “BYOE” - bring your own everything. Just throw down a sleeping bag on the courthouse floor - or move some of the rocks on the mine floor - and make yourself at home.

“We do not guarantee them comfort, just protection,” said Paradise, who is coordinating the shelter plans for the local emergency management agency.

If the “bring your own everything” fiasco of the Hurricane Katrina shelters are anything to go by, chaos in the mine will reign.