Fans of the show Paradise on Hulu, did you know that there is a *real life* underground ‘national emergency’ city??
“The Army Corps of Engineers completed the “Area B” underground complex in 1958-1959. Total construction costs, adjusted for inflation, are estimated to have exceeded $1 billion. Tunnel roofs are shored up with some 21,000 iron bolts driven 8 to 10 feet into the overhead rock. The entrance is protected by a guillotine gate, and a 10 foot tall by 20 foot wide 34-ton blast door that is 5 feet thick and reportedly takes 10 to 15 minutes to open or close. The underground bunker includes a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, an emergency power plant, and a radio and television studio which is part of the Emergency Braodcasting System. A series of side-tunnels accomodate a total of 20 office buildings, some of which are three stories tall. The East Tunnel includes a computer complex for directing emergency simulations and operations through the Contingency Impact Analysis System (CIAS) and the Resource Interruption Monitoring System (RIMS).
An on-site 90,000 gallon/day sewage treatment plant and two 250,000 gallon above-ground storage tanks are intended to support a population of 200 for up to 30 days. Although the facility is designed to accomodate several thousand people (with sleeping cots for 2,000), only the President, the Cabinet, and Supreme Court are provided private sleeping quarters. For Continuity of Government purposes, senior officials are divided into Alpha, Bravo and Charlie teams — one remains in Washington, another relocates to Mount Weather, and the third disperses to other relocation sites. The only full-scale activation of the facility came on 9 November 1965, at the time of the great Northeastern power blackout.”
The above comes from https://publicintelligence.net/mount-weather/ (the map image is from Wikipedia)
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