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- HORNING'S MILLS,
Ontario, (Reuters) - Bruce Beach has buried 42 school buses underground
near his home in a rural Ontario hamlet in anticipation of the worst disaster
mankind has ever seen.
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- Beach is an experienced bomb-shelter builder and a self-professed
doomsayer with an inkling that his moment of truth is finally looming.
It may not be January 1, 2000, but it may not be too much later, either.
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- With help from his son-in-law and three hired handymen
the buses have been knitted together in an underground steel labyrinth.
He's working on his bunker late into December because the weather is unseasonably
warm and time is running out.
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- The moment he's waited a lifetime for could be just days
away.
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- "Prepare for the worst, hope for the best and expect
something in between," is his Y2K motto.
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- With sleeping rotations, Beach believes he can shelter
nearly 500 people. The facility includes air intakes, a nursery, a dentist's
chair, a decontamination area and a sound-proof room for people who may
have a breakdown.
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- "If government and big business are concerned enough
and making preparations, shutting down pipelines and stockpiling with food...it
seems prudent for us to make preparations," said Beach, a 65-year-old
with a big white beard who lives with his wife and looks after his 99-year-old
mother.
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- Few Canadians have devoted as much time and effort to
safeguard against millennium mishaps as this survivalist, who describes
himself as "misunderstood". But then few believe the apocalypse
is around the corner.
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- The disregard for the perils of life in this century
has left Beach, a transplanted American, spooked and isolated.
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- As a young American soldier in the 1960s he was inspecting
missile launch sites and had "first-hand experience of a nuclear threat,
and prepared."
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- He built his first bunker in 1964 in Kansas, and would
eventually lend a hand in constructing more than 20 of them. Now he has
just this one near his house in Horning's Mills, about 100 miles north
of Toronto.
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- He started buying and burying school buses in the early
1980s, a decade after he moved to Canada. He made the move because, he
said, he feared landing in a U.S. concentration camp for social agitators.
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- Beach held a wedding party for his daughter in the bunker
and it has suffered petty vandalism on several occasions, but otherwise
it has gone quietly through the decades.
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- "It's too creepy to work here full-time," said
a handyman replacing rotted floor paneling. He added that Beach has always
made lunch or bought pizza for workers at the bunker.
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- He has received e-mails of interest in bunker-making
from as far away as Australia and Russia. But he can't find anyone closer
to home who shares his interest. "If I knew how to find them I would,"
he said with a shrug.
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- And even in this time of marketable doom and gloom, he
has been unsuccessful at selling his bunker as a place to be at New Year's.
He advertised an overnight Y2K party in his bunker with a big screen television
and lots of food and fun in Toronto newspapers. No one responded.
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- He said most people are not interested because they didn't
experience the bedlam of the 1960s or the big New York electrical blackout
of the same decade.
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- Beach hopes his Web site, www.webpal.org/ArkTwo, will
spark some enthusiasm.
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- He believes the millennium bug may not abruptly end the
world on January 1 but he says the end could come six months later, following
a cascade of geopolitical problems.
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- "Of course everybody just says 'Beach the nut."'
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