First Post -- And some nuclear arms storage...

This blog is more or less dedicated to exploration of abandoned places/installations in the state of Maine, or previous military installations that have since been repurposed. There's really not a whole lot to do up here, so playing Fallout and looking around at bits of local history related to prevention of global nuclear apocalypse is pretty much it (once you remove Allen's coffee brandy from the equation.)

For example...the Weapons Storage Area for what used to be Dow AFB in Bangor, Maine. What's accessible to the average person consists of pretty much a water tower, and looking at bunkers from a few hundred feet away. Past a curve, there are more interesting things -- but we're not going to trespass, and during the time of the visit we didn't know who owned the property (I later found out, because everyone apparently knows or works for everyone else in a state this small.) You can see the interesting, and inaccessible part of the installation below.

The place is bristling with security cameras, you have to figure if someone is going to rent storage space that used to HOLD NUCLEAR WEAPONS for interceptor aircraft and Bomarc unmanned interceptors proto-drones, you have some pretty serious shit to store and probably don't want people fucking with your stuff. I'm not going past the white line until I contact the land owner, which I'll likely do shortly.

The big, old, rusty water tower.

The site itself is used as self storage and a logistics company. Driving up to the site, you can see the original water tower, and some outbuildings. A residence appears to be next to the base of the water tower.  Most of them are your standard hum-drum concrete boxes, but some of them are a bit more....

We couldn't get close enough, but according to a post in this yahoo group the bunkers used to store some pretty interesting stuff.

"Of note, on the back wall of the bunker there was still a sign painted

 that tells of the rated storage limits of the bunker - it says, in part:

AIR-2A 3 MAX

 W25 - 3 MAX"

The W25 was an unguided air-to-air missile with a yield of 1.5 kilotons. The Air-2A was a missile with a  W40 warhead with a 10 kiloton yield. Of note, the W40 warhead was also used in Bomarc interceptor missiles that were kept a few miles away. I got curious, so I thought I'd leave you with a graphical representation of what a warhead of that size would have done to the area...

A bit of layman's interpretation. If you were standing in the bright red circle you were on fire or vaporized. If you were standing in the dull red circle you were also on fire, but would likely take longer to die. Fun stuff, eh?

You can see more up close photos from Cold War Relics , whoever he is, he's more intrepid than I.


-T