Where Uncle Sam Goes If Holocaust Comes To Town

I found this little gem reading through some links...whats expecially interesting is the last paragraph

Where Uncle Sam Goes If Holocaust Comes To Town
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com

Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2001

President Bush�s Sept. 11 hopscotching in Air Force One from Florida to Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to Washington seemed frenetic but was, in fact, part of a fixed plan to safeguard the chief executive and succeed in a vital mission of the Continuity of Government Program (COG).
If the president had been sitting in the Oval Office at the time of the attacks rather than visiting a school in Sarasota, he would still have been whisked aboard Air Force One for an indefinite period of time � a fact apparently not considered by critics of his itinerary that day.

According to rigid operating procedures of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the first line of defense for the president is not the fallout shelter beneath the East Wing of the White House, but a flying command post even more sophisticated than Air Force One and judged safer than any point on the ground.

A key presidential side trip of Sept. 11 was to Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., home to the National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC), where one of four converted 747-200s (code named "Kneecap�) sat ready for takeoff with a full battle staff aboard. Known informally as "the doomsday planes,� the official moniker of the flying NAOCs is "Night Watch.�

With in-flight refueling, each of these planes can remain airborne for as long as three days before needing to return to the deck for a change of oil in the engines.

If the terrorist attacks had continued, national command and control would have left the skies and been grounded somewhere in a chain of secret and not-so-secret shelters for the president, other government leaders and critical personnel.

The "Federal Relocation Arc� is a system of perhaps a hundred shelters for the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government agencies that sweeps through North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

For instance, the Pentagon�s safe house is located at a site called Raven Rock in Maryland. This sprawling 716-acre installation lies 650 feet below the surface. The staffers (about 350) go to work via portals in the mountainside. Amenities include shopping, a barbershop, medical clinic, dining, fitness facilities and a chapel.

Even large defense contractors, such as McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, and AT&T, are said to have their own subterranean facilities.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of terror as an ill-defined enemy�s new weapon of choice, doomsday planners are reassessing crisis scenarios. Old relocation centers are under review. Some will be closed, with others converted to other uses.

As an example, the Federal Reserve Board had its relocation site in Culpeper, Va., until it was mothballed in July 1992. The 43,000-square-foot radiation-proof bunker was reported stocked with enough freeze-dried food to last 30 days. The new relocation site for the board appropriately remains a mystery.

As far as anyone will say, Mount Weather, code-named "High Point,� is still the key facility in the sheltering arc. This is where the president, the Cabinet and the Supreme Court justices may be relocated in the event of a national emergency. High Point is a 61,000-square-foot mountain bunker near Berryville, Va. It has been around since the 1950s and is certainly no longer secret.

On Sept. 11, after departing from Louisiana�s Barksdale A.F.B, the Secret Service urged that the president be flown immediately � not to Mount Weather � but to Colorado Springs, where the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) underground bunker is located.

If Mount Weather, indeed, is no longer the jewel in the Federal Relocation Arc's crown, it would be tough to duplicate. One of the first of nearly 100 Federal Relocation Centers, it took years to complete and is more an underground city than an emergency bunker.

According to the Napa Sentinel, an underground installation with a COG function is under construction near the Oakville Grade in Napa County, Calif. Mysterious helicopter flights go in and out of the area. The Sentinel says "the secret government site is replacing other installations and combining them into one underground center.� In any event, the real issue is how to get key personnel out of Washington and to these places of safety. The Marine helicopters of the presidential squadron at nearby Quantico, Va., cannot ferry them all.

U.S. Patent No. 3,693,731 details an apparatus for tunneling by melting. In part it describes "a machine and method for drilling bore holes and tunnels by melting in which a housing is provided for supporting a heat source and a heated end portion and in which the necessary melting heat is delivered to the walls of the end portion at a rate sufficient to melt rock and during operation of which the molten material may be disposed adjacent the boring zone in cracks in the rock and as a vitreous wall lining of the tunnel so formed.�

In an allied development, MIT engineers Robert Salter and Frank P. Davidson tout their "Planetran� concept for moving people rapidly through very long tunnels.

Planetran, according to Salter, is an "ultra-speed, electro-magnetically propelled and levitated transportation system.� Such a system, say the engineers, could rocket passengers through bored tunnels across the United States in less than an hour "in a quiet, economical, fuel-conservative, and nonpolluting manner.�

Congress already races around in electric carts through tunnels from one Washington office building to another. A system such as Planetran may one day shuttle government leaders in underground safety to locations in the nearby Federal Relocation Arc.