667

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 53 - Outside Temp 235F

Yes, the temperature went up a degree this week. Actually, it was 234.8 most of this time, and it went up a tenth of a degree, so I'm officially rounding up. Dont want to appear like Im minimising or anything.

Spent a lot of this week in the routine of things. Classes and pipe inspection. Havent been talking enough about the food, which is still wonderful. I find myself looking forward to every meal now. The menu is rather noodle heavy here, which I really hadnt noticed til someone pointed out that chicken ala king and hamburger helper arent all that different. Allison says its a good way to sneak canned veggies into the meal.

Emailed a lot with my buddy in Kansas City. He said he was the last one into his shelter, and got in pretty much as they were locking the gates. He got to see the last hours of humanity as the heat was really starting to tear people up.

He said as his escort drove him thru the city he got to see a lot of what folks were spending their last day doing. He was surprised that there wasnt a lot of looting appearant. It was just basically too hot to go outside. People for the most part closed their doors and windows and tried to keep what little coolness their house would hold as long as possible. He said the roads werent busy, there wasnt any traffic jams of people trying to flee, since it seemed obvious there was nowhere better to go. Thats good news for us, because once we do come out, we wont have to waste a lot of time clearing the roads. We wont be finding bodies all over the place like in the movies. Everyone will be at home or at church. Basements are going to be awful. Lots of speculation as to whether we only find piles of dust, or mummies, or whether everyone will look like beef jerky.

What really struck him was seeing a lot of men in front of their houses digging. We'd heard that the Govt asked people to bury their valuables and anything that might be useful to us survivors near the front doors of their homes. The logic being that we'd be able to find the stuff quicker if everyone dug in basically the same place. He says once we start recovering those troves, not to be surprised at the loot we're going to find. People were burying food and guns and money, jewelry, silverware, financial records, photo albums, and weird stuff like televisions and lawnmowers. Hopefully things wont get so desperate that we have to get by on what folks buried in their front yard. I bet nobody dug deep enough.

Bill is trying to talk the Captain into focusing almost all of our effort into tunneling, rather than holding classes. The Science guys have worked out prediction equations for all the different shelter types, and according to their tables, deeper is better. Seems some guy in Indiana who's an expert of Insurance Risk Assesment worked out the variables and no matter what else happens, you have more time to fix a problem is you are deeper. I'm guessing that Bill is right, and naturally that means I'll be getting less sleep.

Not much news from outside. A quiet week is a good week. Or maybe it just means the bad news hasnt gotten to us yet. They say "when it rains, it pours". I wonder when Im going to see rain again?

Of to bed. Good night log.

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 60 - Outside Temp 235F

I hate being right all the time. Lots of bad news. And Bills tunnel project was partially approved.

First the good news: Allison says the kids are eating what is put in front of them. The Food People finished their inventory, and ran that result against the projected food consumption, and adjusted all the numbers for what they estimate we're actually been eating, and cross-referenced with the Medical Staff to make sure we werent all slowing losing weight... and the Grand Talley said ... we arent eating too much.

I guess they were worried about that, and not telling us. Allison says that everyone is going to be trim by the time we get out of here. But unless we have to spend a lot longer than estimated down here, we wont have to start in on the reserves. Theres a down side to this naturally. One, they estimated three years in the shelter, any longer and thats bad. Two, we might not be as happy with the food in the third year as we are now. Three, the reserves arent really "food".

When they were pillaging every store in Wichita and all the surrounding towns to stockpile this shelter, they had time to bring all the Pet Food here too. Its all buried outside the East Entrance. Allison says mixing the canned dog food with the Kibbles will taste "alright" if they dont use up all the spices before. I've cut way back on my ketchup consumption, just to be safe.

Now the Bad News: Lost 2 tunnels to flooding this week. One in West Virginia, and a really big one in India. The Science Guys say they picked up seismic waves that looked like a small earthquake but was probably a dam breaking, or more likely, several dams breaking in sequence. They watched the telemetry from the WV tunnel and somehow the flood water got high enough that it just poured into their air system. Something must have blocked the river downstream to let the water get that high, they say.

The same thing basically happened in India. The snow from the Himalayas should all be melted by now, and it looks like somehow the Ganges upstream from Dehli got blocked, maybe by a landslide. I guess a lot of water came thru in a flash flood and swamped their intakes. The biggest part of the Indian Government was in that shelter.

More Bad News for me: the Captain says we will cut back on classes, and spend that time, plus some of what little "free" time we had, digging a mine shaft. It'll give us more space, and more reserve air, and a cool pocket for emergencies. This was recommended by the Science Council, which is what the Science Guys are calling themselves officially. Every shelter in America is supposedly going to start a tunnel. Fortunately it'll take a week to plan, so I have time for another quick project first.

We're going to build a large barrier in front of our Primary cooling array. We're going to sink 12 big steel pipes about 4 foot into the ground, and leave about 8 foot sticking up, spaced about a foot apart, positioned a few feet in front of the array pipes. Bill asked if we were worried that someone was going to accidently drive a truck into our cooling array, since our barrier would keep out a semi. Ya just never know, I told him. Now we're figuring out the easiest way to build it. Someone has to do an EVA outside with a post hole augar and put in the 4 foot holes to drop the pipes into. Thats going to take some effort. Its possible we could switch to one of the back-up arrays for the time it takes to bore the holes. Then the reversed flow would cool the workers. What Im pushing for us to do is put holes in the pipes near the ground level, and plumb cooling water to them. That way if everything else went wrong, we could manually pump water to em that would pour out the tops, and run down the sides. It'd be steamy cool air that we sucked in, but better than hot air. The Captain is against that, he says just using hoses would do the same thing and be easier. He's probably right, but I'd sorta like to build a fountain.

Time for a quick snack before bed. Night Log.

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 67 - Outside Temp 235F

Bad week. Had our first two non-suicide fatalities. I was almost one of em.

One of the girls was opening a damn cardboard box last week, was using a boxcutter knife, and managed to cut her arm pretty badly. The medicos took care of it pretty easily, but after a few days it got infected, and nothing they gave her helped at all. Her blood went septic and she was dead in 2 days. It happened so fast it didnt really sink in. Doc says it was one-in-a-million, and the same thing might have happened up top in normal times. Proportionaly, every death now is like 9-11 or Pearl Harbor. And we almost all know each other.

The other kid was standing right next to me while we were putting in the pipe array guard. I was supervising while 2 kids in thermal suits were augering out the post holes. It was a bitch because even with the flow reversed, there wasnt much cool air getting to where they had to stand. We had to switch people twice to get every hole dug. I was standing just outside the entrance with my helmet off. We'd done about 9 holes. Just before we got to the halfway point on that hole, and were just about to switch kids, one kid just passed out. Maybe not even from the heat, I had checked his suit before I let em go out.

Anyway, I pulled my head cover down real quick and bolted out to help the kid. The other guy was moving around behind him to get a hold of his shoulder so we could drag him. His foot caught on the electric cord to the auger, and the cord had gotten tangled behind the pipes we had leaning against the concrete enclosure the primary array sits in. He tugged on the cord and the pipe on the end started rolling, and just as we had gotten the passed out kid turned around where we could drag him into the entrance, that damn 12 foot pipe tipped over and hit the other kid right in the back of his neck. Missed me by about a foot.

The pipes are in and everythings working again.

The Deep Tunnel Project is set. We're going to cut a hole in the wall in 4 locations near the far corners our tunnel, dig a staircase down about 50 foot at each location and then start digging galleries off in all four directions. After a few hundred yards of digging, four of the galleries should connect, that'll help the air flow down there. Then they'll start digging parallel galleries every 100 yards so it all starts looking like a big square grid.

At first we'll have four "faces" being dug, with lots of people taking turns at doing different jobs, and once the stairways are dug, there'll have been enough people experienced at digging and shoring up the roof to handle 16 faces, and then maybe 32 faces while we dig the parallels. That'll keep a lot of people busy. The hard part will be going outside and scounging shoring materials for the ceilings. Probably we'll use the metal siding from the factory walls and the heavy legs from the parts racks that the place was full of. It would have been nice if they'd have had the big rolls of sheet aluminum, but I guess they didnt do that job in this factory. They mostly assembled parts made in other factories in other states.

I was going to talk about all the military tunnels I'd been hearing about, but this is getting long and I'm plumb wore out. Allison says to go get us a snack from the cafe and then its bed time. She really likes her midnite brownie. I usually get 2 chocolate chip cookies. That sounds good, Im gonna sign off.

Gnite log.

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 74 - Outside Temp 234F

Temp dropped to 234.7. Bill says its a cold front. I dont want to sound pessimistic so I'm dropping the number.

I expected to be worn out this week but it wasnt so bad. The Dig Crews are making good progress on the stairway faces. Making holes in the walls was only a bigger problem than anticipated on the NE Corner, where they had thicker concrete than we planned for. I think we started the cut 10 feet from where we planned but the lady running that dig says no. But they moved the cut and started over. Im right all the time.

I thought I'd be in charge of the crew that takes the dirt outside, but the Captain wanted someone else to get experience at EVAs, so Im in charge of moving the dirt from the dig face to the entrances. Not much to do, since each dig has a person in charge of that already. So I just walk from dig to dig making sure the local boss is getting the job done. Its a lot of walking, but I'm spending less time each day at this, since its all going smoothly.

Since the digs are already near the entrances, the dirt doesnt have to go far. Two kids with wheelbarrows can keep up. They dont disrupt the tunnel activity much. Its only a problem when the wheelbarrows get outside. Kids in thermal suits have to wheel the dirt a good way from the entrance. Once they get hot, the dirt backs up. Its going to be a problem eventually unless the Plan to make more thermal suits works. They have a bunch of the girls in a sort of Home Ec Class making new suits out of ski suits and aluminum foil. They think they can make 10 good suits a week. In two years maybe enough for everyone in the shelter. That'll open up some possibilities.

They cut back my Jock Class to free up time to dig. That didnt hurt my feelings.

More soon. But right now time for a brownie and a nap.
Good Nite Log

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 81 - Outside Temp 235F

Temps back up again. Not a big deal.

Sub Tunnels going smoother than anticipated. Found a large supply of plywood in the building across the alley from the West Entrance. A couple trips with pallet dollies ( little fork lift things you pull by hand) gets enough for a day, and the boys distribute it to the digs in less than an hour. Building little railroad tracks out of aluminum tube and 4 x 4 wood planks. Goes from the NW entrance south to where the shipping containers in the West alley need to be covered with dirt to make more storage space. Seems like theres always a wheelbarrow in the way when you try to walk anywhere, but thats a small price to pay I suppose.

Said I was going to talk some about the Military Tunnels and Shelters.

The Air Force has around 2000 old missile silos and the attached Command Bunkers that they've put their people into. They're smaller than most folks think, so 20 people are stuffed into them. A silo is essentially 5 round rooms 12 feet in diameter stacked up, so they put 5 families of 4 into them. With 3 years of food and not many comforts, they need to be very patient people to get along. The Command bunkers get 10 people, they are really just one large room, 12 foot wide by 30 or so feet long.

Cheyenne Mountain was an obvious shelter, they have a water source and air system already. Thats over 5 acres of space, bigger than our tunnel, so they have over 2000 folks inside. Pretty much anyone thats worked there and their families are sheltered. After the Heat drops, they'll go right back to monitoring space for incoming threats.

Every Air Base, Army Post, Marine Camp and Navy Base has some sort of underground shelter, some of em were slapped together like ours from whatever basement or maintainence tunnel or ammo bunker they had handy. The Navy has all their submarines submerged right next to a dock. I guess they wanted to try sinking some of their surface ships after sealing them up real tightly, but that didnt pan out in the time they had. Someone said that the reason we arent all eating nothing but MREs is that they all went to the military shelters. Lucky us.

Now the Government Shelters are another story. They arent talking too much about how many or how large their tunnels are. But you can sort of read between the lines and piece together a good idea of how prepared they were. I've emailed dozens of my friends and folks I've worked with before, in shelters all over the country, and none of them have any politicians with them. You can be certain they took care of their families first. Near as we can tell, every courthouse in America has a bomb shelter underneath and they've all been turned into shelters. And the Federal Govt must have had at least one of those huge hotel sized underground facilities like the Greenbriar in every state, in case the President needed to land out in the middle of nowhere in an emergency. Those bunkers can hold a thousand each easily if they're all as big as the one in West Virginia. Turns out all that money they wasted in the Cold War is proving useful after all.

One clue that the Govt is still up and running (ie interfering) is that the Captain spends a couple hours every day sending status reports to the Governors Staff. The Captain says they werent that interested in our situation until someone realized that every kid here will be old enough to vote before the heat drops outside. Typical.

Thats too much typing. I feel like walking around the place again. We had baked beans and bbq ham for dinner which is a little heavy. No cookie tonite. OK maybe one.

Good Nite Log

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 88 - Outside Temp 235F

Almost 3 months. Starting to notice that things arent quite as crowded, as we've eaten enough now to have made a little extra room. Plus more people happily digging away in the basement. Except for the wheelbarrows, its gotten nearly so empty that you can reach out without touching anyone.

Tunneling going smooth as silk. Everyone takes turns digging, shoring, hauling dirt up, hauling dirt out, and we're getting a lot of folks trained in doing things outside in the Cool Suits. The real Fire Suits that you could fight a jet crash fire in are better, but the homemade ones work fine, for 30 minutes or so. Just have to keep everyone extra aware of their air tube, one kink or tear and you have to get back inside asap or else. The Chambers at the bottom of each stairway are complete and now we have a tunnel heading off in 4 directions from each Chamber. 16 dig faces now. Cant wait til they meet up. Big party planned, and the tunnels that are working towards each other are naturally racing, and the best crews somehow always find themselves on those faces.

The worst news of this week was the disaster in England. A big factory basement, rather like ours, except square rather than corridor shaped. Lots of pillars. Somewhere near Manchester I think. They didnt insulate the factory overhead, they just piled dirt on the concrete and put in a sprinkler system to keep it moist. Their air system is a lot like ours tho, with a grid of pipes being fed cool water and air flowing over them to cool.

They have a very good telemetry guy there, we had a minute by minute view of everything that happened to them. Temp readings and video and anything else we could want.

About 11 AM thier time, the crankshaft broke on the diesel engine that turns their primary cooling water pumps. The water immediately stopped going thru the cooling pipe array and you could watch the ambient air temperature slowly rise in every part of their shelter. They quickly tried to start their backup engine but it wouldnt start. They didnt exactly panic at that point but they got very very busy, some things they tried didnt help.

They shut off everything that made heat, cooking, washing, most of their computers, a lot of their lighting. They blocked the entrances to keep the cool air in as long as possible. They moved as many people as would fit into the few extra tunnels they'd dug, and a bunch of them went into their frozen food storage room. They took all their frozen food, and stacked it up by an entrance and pulled air over it with a battery driven fan to keep things a little cooler, which helped some. They tore into the backup generator like a team of race car mechanics, and the primary too.

It had gotten pretty hot in their shelter, above 140 F, and the only ones still effective were the guys wearing the heat suits, which slowed them down a lot. After almost 3 hours without cool air, they finally replaced the crankshaft in the primary and hit the starter.

They got it running, and the water cooled the air off, but they'd lost almost 300 people to the heat. It hit us hard, several of our kids had pen-pals there. It was a shelter a lot like ours, with mostly kids a year or two older than the ones here. They still arent sure what went wrong on the secondary, but I'll wager it was some small matter.

Food this week was great as usual. Spagetti Monday, chili, beenie weenies, turkey with stuffing on Thurs, and pancakes and sausage on Friday. Pork chops yesterday. Beef stew today. Been eating a lot of peanut butter for lunch lately, rather than a sandwich, just to break up the routine. Staying trim. Taking my vitamins. Being a good little underground astronaut.

Time for a brownie and a nap.
Goodnite Log

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 95 - Outside Temp 235F

Another Sunday, another blister from moving dirt. Not complaining. I'll leave that to the kids. They do enough.

Fairly quiet week. Found out from Bill that the Air Force has "lost" about 20 of the missile silo shelters. Half to fires and half to mechanical breakdowns. They consider a shelter Lost if over half the occupants are killed. So there were some survivors in a few silos, including one that managed to evacuate one at a time to another silo a mile away. I guess they used their Fire Suit to walk there, borrow that shelters suit, come back, and then back and forth taking one person per trip and returning carrying the extra suit. Must have taken a long time, and imagine being the last to leave, alone in a failing shelter. Im learning to imagine a lot of creepy things.

Good news from Nevada. The Whizz Shelter has upped their water output enough that 3/4 of their water is fresh. Very good news for their long term health. Seems they managed to raise the humidity level in their tunnel, and string up various things for the moisture to condense on, like fishing line and plastic jugs. They catch the drips, and what runs down the walls even. Doesnt leave them time to tunnel, but they've got a promising water well going down, hand dug. Their water table is deep, and the rock is very hard. But its away from the diesel contaminated wells, so if they hit water they're going to be very happy. The high humidty is not healthy tho, so we're hoping they strike water soon.

Tunneling here was going pretty smoothly til Wednsday. One of the holes is "on strike" appearantly because they didnt like they way they were getting bossed around by the Adults. I think the ringleaders of the strike are the Football Jocks from my morning class. Either they're staying in the tunnel or using it as an excuse to cut class, since I havent seen them since Monday. Thats not such a bad thing.

Food - promised the wife I'd talk more about her job. We've started having Meatless Mondays and Fishy Fridays, as a way to stretch the food supplies. The kids bitch every Monday. I have a donut, a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and soup n salad for dinner. If the kids cant figure out theres meat in the soup, thats too bad. A big chunk of bread with lots of butter and Im fine. Have to admit, lunch on Tuesday is when I get pulled to the bologna on the sandwich cart. A day without meat makes everything taste better. Fishy Fridays dont bother me at all. Even tho its just a big cafeteria, the food is better than it was in the Navy, and the chow on an Aircraft Carrier is hard to beat.

We've eaten almost 10% of our indoor supplies, and moved some of the mechanical items outside, so now we have what seems like a lot more room down here. Allison is happy that the freezer room has an aisle now, so she can get to anything she needs with only an hour of re-stacking.

Thats about it. More next week I guess. I like weeks where food is the Main Subject.
So I am off to get a cookie.
Later Log

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 102 - Outside Temp 235F

I was way off last week. The Strike in the NorthEast Tunnel is way more serious than anyone realized.

The story is very confused still. Theres 20 kids in the NE Dig, and 3 adults. We're sure of that since we took role and did a sweep of the entire tunnel to make sure everyone was counted. That took a surprising amount of effort, since oddly enough some people were actively trying to avoid being found. We thought there were 30 or more kids down there but people realized they'd seen a few of them here and there, and they couldnt be two places at once. We had to form Sweep Teams and work both directions at once. Found two kids hiding in the freezer and one inside a pipe, just outside the SE entrance. Still not sure why they were hiding but they were all buddies with the ones that started the Strike.

We're fairly certain that someone was killed at the start of the Strike, but we dont know yet if it was a kid or an adult. There might be more dead and probably some injuries too. One of the Doctors took a bag down there Tues but hasnt come up yet. Its gone on over a week now. We have to lower food and water down the stairwell, an pull up their crap in plastic jugs. If it was up to me they'd be drinking their own piss.

There was a phone and a video cam down there, but the Strikers tore them out at the start. The Captain and a couple others are negotiating by yelling down the stairway, but they are staying quiet on letting us know whats happening. They might have the adults and the doctor tied up as hostages. Theres a lot of wild rumors going around and it takes time to keep everyone calm. Someone said everyone is dead down there, or one of the adults went crazy, or they found something buried and its being kept secret. Nobody knows for sure. Those that do arent talking.

Its disrupted everything else that was going on here. The other 3 tunnels are creeping along. Classes are still happening, but we spend most of that time talking about the rumors. Every meal is dominated by discussion. The Jocks that werent in the NE Tunnels and the girlfriends of the ones that are have been "locked up" in one of the classrooms and kept away from the other kids, they were starting a lot of fights and basically causing trouble. Its a big mess.

Hafta keep this week short.
Gnite Log

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 109 - Outside Temp 235F

Situation here very tense, and confused. After a week and a half, the "strikers" came up out of the NE Dig. I think "Mutiney" is a better term now.

I thought things were confused before, when they were down in the hole and wouldnt come up. It didnt get any better, and the troubles up here just got 10 times worse.

The Captain finally got the Kids to agree to come up. Scuffling started before they were even up the stairs. We should have taken them directly into custody right then, no matter what we promised them. But they scattered around the Shelter, most of em went to the cafeteria, and started another big fight there. Now most of em are cooped up in their bunks, and everyone else is avoiding them as much as possible.

All three of the adults that were in the Dig when the trouble started are dead. Beat to death with shovels by the looks of it. The story from the kids is that one guy went crazy and killed the other two, and kids had to kill him. I'm not buying it. They had a week to get their stories to match. And after that long what little forensic evidence there might have been has been stamped out. Doc says they'd buried the bodies and dug them up several times. Probably because of the smell.

I dont know why the Captain hasnt taken better control of the situation. If we had a real policeman down here the kids would all have been locked up right away. They havent even been properly questioned yet in my opinion. Nobody with any sense is happy to have 20 possible murderers running around loose.

Theres talk among the Staff of having a trial of some kind. Not sure how well that will work now that everythings been let go for so long. Except for the bodies there wont be any uncompromised evidence, all the witnesses were in the Dig and seem to be protecting each other, and I seriously doubt we could put together an impartial jury in a situation like this. What bothers me most is how the kids seem to be protecting the guilty ones. I guess I should say "suspects" instead. I suppose the people who were hunting Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde had the same problem with sympathetic locals interfering with their investigations.

Otherwise a quiet week thank god. Lets hope this works itself out somehow.

[Saxon Dog]

Personal Log - Tunnel 3 - Day 116 - Outside Temp 235F

Theres just no justice in this world. None at all.

First the bad news. Theres no news at all, and thats just wrong.

I helped carry 3 dead people outside, where we "buried them". Put em next to a concrete retaining wall near the old loading dock upstairs, where all the suicides and the kid who got hit with the pipe are, and threw some dirt on em. Didnt say any words over them while we were outside. I knew one of the guys pretty well, since his classroom was next to mine.

And nothing else happened on that situation. The Captains acting like it didnt happen. He gets snappy if we try to discuss it. Theres starting to be a split among the Staff. Those that want a trial, and those who say the Captain is right and just let it go. I cant imagine this not somehow causing a bigger problem eventually. Allison agrees with me that the kids involved are the worst of the bullies, and they will only get worse as time goes by without any penalty at all.

At least the worst of the scuffling has subsided. I think some threats have been made by people on both sides. Some of the adults are avoiding certain areas of the shelter, and trying to act like its just inconvieniant to go there. But I think its just that they're afraid of some of the kids now. Time will tell I guess. I'm going to keep pressuring the Captain whenever I can.

The other non-important news of Injustice came in Wednsday from our favorite shelter in Nevada. While digging a well to hopefully increase their water supply, they struck a rich vein of gold. Preliminary estimates are that it could be the richest deposit in Nevada. Lotta good it'll do them. Nowhere to spend it, haha. We can dig here for years and hit more dirt. They have to ignore the gold seam and keep digging down for water tho, which right now is more precious.

Not much digging going on here. And only half the kids are coming to class (the nerds, naturally). So not very busy actually. More time to worry. Think I'll mosey over and have me a brownie. Kiss the wife. Take a nap. Dream about flying.
Gnite you stupid Log.