Y2K doomsayer has waited a lifetime to prove himself

By Luke McCann

HORNING'S MILLS, Ontario, Dec 20 (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.

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.

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.

The moment he's waited a lifetime for could be just days away.

"Prepare for the worst, hope for the best and expect something in between," is his Y2K motto.

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.

"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.

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.

The disregard for the perils of life in this century has left Beach, a transplanted American, spooked and isolated.

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."

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Beach hopes his Web site, www.webpal.org/ArkTwo, will spark some enthusiasm.

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.

"Of course everybody just says 'Beach the nut.'"

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Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), December 20, 1999

Answers

Wow! Now that's what I call serious Y2K preps!

-- Bruce (broeser@ccgnv.net), December 20, 1999.

Is this the same "Beach" of the Embedded Clocks essay?

-- Nemo (noname@thistime.com), December 20, 1999.

Nemo, I believe so.

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), December 20, 1999.

But, are they white busses?

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), December 20, 1999.

>>Beach, a transplanted American, <<

Geez, we can't even produce our own wackos. We have to import them. The stealthy American takeover of Canada continues.....

-- Johnny Canuck (j_canuck@hotmail.com), December 20, 1999.