2 posts tagged “fallout shelter”
BEDS are on offer for just $6 a night at the world’s first zero-star hotel — based in a converted NUCLEAR BUNKER.
But guests at the no-frills establishment will have to put up with hot water bottles rather than central heating.
And they will be given a pair of EARPLUGS to help blot out the racket
from the ventilation system.
Standard beds at the austere Null Stern (No Star) hotel in Sevelen, near Zurich, Switzerland, are military-style bunks.
Eleven pounds extra buys a "luxury" room, with "antique" beds from a condemned hotel.
Complimentary slippers are provided for walking across the icy concrete floors — while customers enter a draw to decide who gets the luxury of a hot morning shower.
And with no windows, the only view of the outside world is via a row of monitors in reception. The bed-and-no-breakfast hotel began life as an art project by twins Frank and Patrik Riklin.
They turned it into a full-time business when interest grew, and plan to welcome their first guests early in the new year.
They could convert 11 more bunkers if the first proves a success.
Patrik, 34, said: �Switzerland has lots more civil defence buildings. We’ve had inquires from all over the world.�
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (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.
After Sept. 11,
Homeland Security created a metropolitan protection program that
includes nuclear-attack preparation and mass shelters. But no other
city has taken the idea as far as Huntsville has, officials said ...
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.
Convenience store owner Tandi Prince said she cannot imagine living in the cavern after a bombing.
"That would probably not be very fun," she said.
