Wesley Morgan, 71, a rich Republican who once got elected to the Kentucky legislature, maybe because he resembled Richard Nixon (photo, left), spent $3 million on a bomb shelter under his house (photo, right) when Barack Obama was elected president.
I guess that’s okay if you can’t think of anything else to do with $3 million. I’m not criticizing him. It makes little sense, that’s all. Let’s start with the earthquakes.
Morgan’s shelter is designed to withstand 12.0 earthquakes. There’s never been one; the biggest was the 1960 Chilean 9.5 quake. A 12.0 might split the planet apart, create a new asteroid belt, and Morgan in his bunker would drift off into space on an asteroid.
Moreover, it’s not clear there’s ever been an earthquake of any size where he lives. According to this website, Kentucky has had 77 recorded earthquakes since 1931, none over 5.1 (a mere ground vibration), and his county isn’t on the at-risk list.
So, he probably didn’t build it for earthquakes, he more likely was expecting a nuclear war. There’s an army ammunition depot nearby, but probably not worth wasting a nuclear weapon on, although you never know. More likely, Morgan worried about fallout blanketing the planet following a nuclear war.
That’s certainly something to think about, and he wisely equipped his bunker with air filters and stocked it with freeze-dried food. But how do you keep the toilets working, what do you do for electricity, and what happens when the food runs out? Sooner or later, you’ll have to go above ground anyway, if you’re still alive. And then you’ll just be another Mad Max like the rest of us.
So, while I’m not saying nuclear war will never happen, the whole idea of bunkering-down strikes me as futile. Maybe he watched too many apocalypse movies.
But as paranoid as Morgan is, Vince Gilday, 23, is even more paranoid. His mom describes him as “not of sound mind the last couple of weeks, distraught with the certainty a nuclear war is imminent,’ which might not be entirely irrational given Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling lately. But Gilday’s plan to survive Crazy Vlad’s paranoid button-pushing was even nuttier than Morgan’s.
He decided to steal Morgan’s bomb shelter.
Gilday knew about it because Morgan put his house up for sale last year and the listing agent promoted its bomb shelter as a selling feature. (The whole package could’ve been yours for $6.5 million.)
So Gilday dressed up in burglar clothes, gained entry by breaking a window, shot Morgan’s 32-year-old lawyer daughter to death in her sleep, shot and wounded Morgan and his 40-year-old current wife, along with “a fourth person,” and apparently ate some lead himself when Morgan engaged him in a gun battle. He hasn’t been caught yet; cops are still looking for him.
This points out another problem with bomb shelters: If you have one, and your neighbors don’t, when the time comes (or even if it doesn’t), they’ll want yours.
From the very beginning of Cold War bomb scares, this point made its way into film and TV end-of-world depictions, e.g. Rod Serling’s 1961 screenplay for “Twilight Zone,” episode 68 (details here), so it’s not exactly a sleeper. These shows invariably depict panicked people trying to break down doors, with no real plan beyond getting inside, but Gilday didn’t follow that script. His scheme was more premeditated.
It’s not clear, though, whether he had a plan beyond breaking into Morgan’s house and stealing his bomb shelter. One can only assume he intended to occupy it. After all, he couldn’t make off with it, as a burglar would with jewelry or silverware. The bomb shelter wasn’t going anywhere, and if he wanted to retain possession, neither was he. The cops eventually would have found the dead bodies upstairs in the house, the sealed door to the shelter, and deduced someone was inside.
That wasn’t the only weakness of Gilday’s scheme. He evidently forgot that people paranoid enough to have bomb shelters also invariably have guns, to defend their shelter and food supply from people like him. He’s probably looking for a hospital now, if he didn’t go into the woods to die.
Frankly, I think they’re both rather nuts. Story and more photos here.