NEWSLETTER

ILLUSTRATION BY MILANO CHOW


n 1980, Bruce Beach decided to build a fallout shelter in a hillside half a mile from his home in the tiny village of Horning’s Mills, Ontario. He buried four gutted, interlocked school buses in the ground, and it was just big enough for him and his family. Then, in 1985, he decided to add another four buses. It would have ended there, but the tow-truck guys who sold the buses to him kept coming with more buses, and he kept taking them. He stopped at 42 buses, only because construction needed to be finished before winter.

Work crews poured tons of concrete over the buses’ forms. It had to be poured over all 42 buses at once so that it didn’t cause them to shift out of position. Then the concrete had to be sprayed with water for a month to keep it damp until it was fully set, to prevent cracking. The buses encased in concrete make a honeycomb structure, one of the strongest natural forms. According to Bruce, the shelter can withstand a nuclear blast from a mile outside the blast crater of the explosion. That doesn’t really matter though, since it’s located 20 miles away from anything that could be considered a nuclear target. By the time it was finished in 1985, Ark Two, as it came to be called, was a 10,000-square-foot underground complex that could shelter hundreds of people.

Bruce is a hearty, white-haired Kansan, a Santa Claus type who speaks with hard Midwestern consonants and Canadian vowels. He’s in his 70s and has a bit of a lazy eye from a stroke he suffered years ago, but he’s so full of piss and vinegar that it’s easy to forget his age. He began to worry about nuclear war in the late 1950s, when he was a control tower operator at Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia, landing the big bombers. “It was one of the five bases in the US where you had to have a top-secret security clearance. I saw very unusual types of aircraft there—black birds, flying wings, planes that I’ve never seen since. And I saw UFOs there. I have tons of UFO stories. Anyway, that made me more aware of the delivery and the power of nuclear weapons. When I got out of the service, that was when I first started to store supplies, have a bug-out bag, and make plans to escape.”

One of the more than 150 jobs Bruce has held since then was as a general contractor, building over 20 shelters in Utah and Idaho during the 1960s. In ’74, Bruce felt that then vice president Spiro Agnew was after him. “The rumor was that camps were being opened for people who objected to the administration’s extreme views on things.” Bruce’s wife, Jean, had family in Horning’s Mills and she owned some land there—including the hill where Ark Two was eventually built—so it seemed the place to go.

At one point Bruce was part owner of a company that built robotic arms, one of which was used to salvage the space shuttle Challenger. This may be where the money for Ark Two came from, although Bruce doesn’t talk about his finances or what it cost to build the shelter. You see, Ark Two has caused him tax problems. In spite of the fact that he provided a full accounting of the construction to the assessors, they simply didn’t believe that it was possible to build such a large underground structure for the amount he declared. An informed estimate from another source put the cost of the original construction around $1 million, and the cost to replace it today at $2 million.

When we visited him last month, Bruce predicted, “with 90 percent certainty,” that a nuclear war would be underway within six weeks. There was already one US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf menacing Iran, and a second was due to arrive within a few days. Bruce explained that the US would use a small nuke on Iran, at which point Pakistan would face a “use it or lose it” scenario. India, Israel, and Russia would likely follow suit. When I couldn’t help but ask Bruce, in a snotty college-boy way, if he really believed this with 90 percent certainty, he said: “That’s where I’m at. You’re talking to the fellow who’s got probably the largest private survival complex in North America. You’ve gotta be motivated, y’know? I travel in a circle where everybody believes this is going to happen. Go down and talk to a Baptist minister about the probability that the Rapture is going to occur in the next year, and Jesus is going to come down—he really believes that.” I stuttered that I wasn’t dismissing his prediction, just the probability. I said I would put the probability at more like one percent. For the rest of the weekend, when I got on his nerves he would call me “Mr. One Percent.” It was a pretty good burn, actually.

BEN WHITE


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