Project Hiding Places

[kato13]

Cockburn Island (Wikipedia)

While looking for a location for Damocles I discovered this potential gem of a secret hiding place for the project. It is a Canadian Island (Ontario) located in Lake Huron, though it is physically closer to the US than Canada.

With an area of 64 square miles (167.60 sq km), a permanent population of only 10, a 3000 foot (914 m) runway, and a location almost in the geographic center of the Great Lakes it seems like a perfect location so some sort of project asset.

Given the local geology I am assuming it mostly dolomitic limestone and is almost fully covered with medium density forests. This has led to long term logging projects and the fact that over 90% of the island is now owned by an American logging concern. The remainder being held for a small unpopulated Indian reservation and about 90 summer homes.

Given I have not been able to find a good map I have produced the one below. Topographic lines represent a 50 foot increase in elevation. The highest point appears to be about 400 feet above lake level. Solid brown lines are gravel roads, broken lines are trails or paths. The red lines represent the airport.




If anyone has any other interesting potential project locations please post them.

[Matt W]

http://www.dollywood.com/

An amusement park might seem an odd place to put a Morrow Project base, but it has several assets

1. Good accessibility (easy access to Interstate road system) but not an obvious place for refugees to try and reach
2. Easy to get personnel there before freezing
3. It's a good 'front' when recruiting craftsmen, technicians, engineers etc
4. 'Dollywood' has several displays which would be useful in the Reconstruction Effort (including a working grist mill and a functional steam train)

It could also be used as a Psych Test facility (Did the prospective MP member run away from the Southern Gospel Museum and Hall of Fame? How Fast? Was he/she screaming?)

[electronicdaze]

After I started playing Morrow Project I realized that a lot of the bolt holes were in overly complicated locations that required extensive cover stories for their construction. Since the simpler bolt-holes and supply caches were simply concrete boxes buried underground, why not simply use ready made boxes? Thus the SCORE idea.

The idea also lends itself well to an emergency emplacement. I based my last game with characters being emplaced in 2010, when a cold war with China loomed. Morrow Project was re-activated in a matter of months and forced to rapidly re-deploy old members and young recruits. Old bolt-holes were nearly impossible, so shipping containers were retrofitted for the job and deployed using the simplest methods possible, with little to no special equipment needed and small construction teams.

Pre-emplacement work is simply a big trench which is easily explained and easy to make with commonly available earth moving equipment. The power cell would be buried adjacent to or under the trench. A small recon team and gear would fit into one large semi-trailer, which could be slid into the trench, fitted with a simple hollow wedge (vehicle ramp complete with powered doors) at one end and a concrete escape tunnel at the other. Larger teams with more personnel and equipment would simply mean a longer or wider trench for an additional trailer. The whole assembly is then covered liberally in poured concrete and then dirt. Supply Caches would be much the same, with a smaller container.

Emplacement would take as little as a day, anywhere a trench could be dug.

The containers themselves would be welded stainless steel coated in epoxy and painted to match a common trucking company. Inside, the innermost end would be metal racks, cryo-tubes on the bottom with equipment overhead. Cramped of course. Far end facing the doors would be the team vehicle and any other gear.

[ArmySGT.]

Hot Scout. A subsidiary of the Council of Tomorrow in full cooperation with Morrow Industries.

These structures in remote locations of National Forests and National Parks assist the Department of the Interior personnel with the location of forest fires in wild lands. One in ten of theses structures is large enough to accommodate several personnel at the height of a busy fire season. Acting as a local weather reporting station, radio relay, and as well with a 5000 liter tank to draw from these help wild land fire fighters monitor conditions that can lead to fire spreading, and supply water to fire engines.

This is a system of shelters and facilities for Project personnel assigned to scout and assist in rural or mountain communities. The larger multi person dwellings setups was to relocate and recruit more Rangers and to increase the number of rural Law Enforcement as well. The Rangers of the Park Service and the Forestry Service took great pride in these facilities that look like the classic and beautiful structure built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. What none were aware of was the cache located beneath the structure or adjacent vehicle shelter or horse barn intended for them. The Project provided for the Ranger service new AM and FM radios, a satellite telephone (through Morrowsat), as well as 3 years of freeze dried rations, medical supplies, and NBC protection and decontamination tools.

Beneath one or more of the remote stations may be lurking a Recon or MARS team bolt hole with personnel trained for mountain and cold weather operations. The Project vehicle is likely to be the V-150 APC or a M973 Ridgeway SUSV.

Project personnel would have atleast one person with the electronics and radio knowledge to repair these remote monitoring sites. Spares and replacement modules are located in separate caches from the Teams regular supply caches.

[ArmySGT.]

2-Morrow mail (Tomorrow), a wholly owned subsidiary of Morrow Industries.

Let us be your all in one stop for mail delivery, mail forwarding, pack and ship packages! Use our print center for your home and small business needs such as banners, large format printing, bulk printing (black&white or full color), even book binding for pamphlets or other materials.

The 2-Morrow mail set up functioned reasonably well as mail service and copy center, generating income while operating as a front for the post War purpose. Truly hidden in plain sight. The 2-Morrow mail is meant to assist the Combined Group Commander and all team members in various ways. Number one, it will still function as a P.O. box for any member of a combined team. After wakeup and at first opportunity a Project member presents his or her Project ID to the Project personnel operating a 2-Morrow mail outlet. Once this happens any personal or Project mail (non secure) will be forwarded to that location. Secondly, a 2-Morrow mail operates as a location for various field teams to turn in their reports, to be digitized, microfilmed, or transported to the proper regional base or Prime Base via Morrowsat or other network. Third, the print services are there to assist the Combined Group Leader, psyops teams, civil action teams, or other teams with a need to distribute printed information or pamphlets materials to the local populace.

Any 2-Morrow mail can have a cache of printing material to continue operating and medical supplies to assist local needs. Few may include a Morrow water treatment system to provide potable water to teams and local populace. Some 2-Morrow mail facilities have a five or ten year fusion power system to operate and others are meant to use portable powerpacks or draw power from Project vehicles. A very rare 2-Morrow mail facility will contain cryosleep tubes with members of the Frozen Watch. Those Frozen Watch personnel located in a 2-Morrow mail would typically be psychological ops, government administration, legal affairs, and other disciplines that would interact chiefly with the local populace to restore government.

[kato13]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

2-Morrow mail (Tomorrow), a wholly owned subsidiary of Morrow Industries.

I like it. It meshes well with my concept of using Ground transportation services as I mentioned in this thread.

forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=951

[stormlion1]

The only problem I see with putting a Project Bolthole on a island is the simple fact its a Island! Moving equipment and a vehicle is going to be tough without a boat or bridge and Cockburn Island (Seriously a bad name for a island) has neither. The closest two landmasses are Drummond Island which uses a ferry to get to the continental US and Manitoulian which had two bridges that need to be used to exit into Canada. Bridges that may not be there or be blocked after a nuclear attack. And after a 150 years those bridges probably wouldn't be all that sound or there anymore.
Cockburn Island (I wonder where they got the name?) might serve better as a supply point that would use the Airfield and buried hangers for Cargo aircraft that could be used to resupply Morrow Teams away from there own resupply points. But as a Bolthole location a Island is a bad idea in my book unless one is willing to cache a series of boats usable on the Great Lakes and capable of carrying project Vehicles to the mainland.
Might be a good spot though for a secondary Prime Base, or a training area for Project Teams before being frozen.

[kato13]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Might be a good spot though for a secondary Prime Base, or a training area for Project Teams before being frozen.

The thoughts I had for it were

Secondary Prime

Launch site for a communication balloons

Logistical Hub for Great lakes traffic.



The thought that it could be a training facility is a good one. I imagine a Morrow corporation could buy the entire island (Morrow Timber?) and another corp could do wilderness "Team Building" exercises there. At least that would be a good cover story.

As far as logistics it has a reasonable harbor which could perhaps be improved when morrow timber buys the island.

[stormlion1]

Communication Balloon's are nice, but it might be better to have a Communications antenna stored in sections and a concrete base prebuilt. After the team wakes up they can erect a small comm's tower to handle Great Lakes communications traffic and/or set up repeater tower's all around the Great Lakes region to restore comm's for Morrow Personnel. The island would act as a hub for communication for the Northern US, Southern Canada.
Separate area's could do the same and if done properly could allow communications to be set up across North America. Of course that's a best case scenario, which the Morrow Project isn't a good example of, with people waking up willy nilly as they are.

[ArmySGT.]

Where even your friend Bruce can put away today, what he might need tomorrow.

The Econo-Locker (A division of Morrow Industries) is your typical series of 40-200 individual storage units for rent by the public for stuff they just don't have room for at home. Units a prefabricated sheet metal 20' wide by 100' long, then further subdivided into smaller units internally. Each lockable outdoor space has a rollup door. None are furnished with water or power and the climate is not controlled in anyway. It is just a lockable storage unit.

Atleast on the surface, below each slab poured to accommodate the 20'x100' structure is a cache located from 10' to 30 feet underneath the foundation. These large scale cache sites typically hold building materials such as concrete sealed in drums, prefabricated structures like Quonset huts, kegs of nails, assortments of nuts and bolts, pallets of insulation, electrical wire, sockets, power panels, and junction boxes. These are enough items for a Morrow Project engineering team to assemble habitable structures for refugees left homeless by damage or fallout. There can be possibilities for large scale storage of medical diagnostic equipment to create hospitals or improve others. There can be a cache of M151 jeeps with dual fuel (gas/ethanol) motors painted in the livery of the post office, local police, civil defense, the sherrifs office, or any assortment of governmental organizations.

The Group Leader and Regional Base Commander is aware of these large scale caches, though a PD may leave the above hint or let Team know if they are a specialty engineer team.

[stormlion1]

A good spot to hide something is under one end of a rural Overpass. I watched one getting built once and noticed that the space behind one end was empty, a big concrete box with a pipe for a Sewer line and a lot of empty space. Have a construction company do a repair of a rural overpass, build a small enclosed area behind one end and lace the side facing the road with explosives and then hide gear within. When the time comes and the nuclear war has come and gone, supplys can be gained by blowing the wall and getting to the goodys within. No one would ever guess equipment might be stored under a bridge, in fact thousand would drive by it every day and never know!

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by kato13

Given I have not been able to find a good map I have produced the one below. Topographic lines represent a 50 foot increase in elevation. The highest point appears to be about 400 feet above lake level. Solid brown lines are gravel roads, broken lines are trails or paths. The red lines represent the airport.

[stormlion1]

You know, I just noticed that airstrip on the island. I wonder how long that's been there and if it was paved how long it might last. Would make a good way to transport a team off the island after a nuclear war if the Bolt Hole has a hidden hanger near by.

[Gelrir]

The airstrip is in regular use, mostly in the summer. The island has 79 vacation homes; some of the home-owners fly in.

Wikipedia says the airstrip is unpaved grass; and in fact there are no paved roads on the island. There's a school, a town hall, and at least one church. There's an underwater power line leading to the island.

Apparently the best way to get heavy stuff there is to wait until the lake freezes over ...

The residents have a Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/31936991742/

--
Michael B.

[stormlion1]

Interesting. So while it might be a pain to hide a Bolt Hole and a cache for a disassembled small aircraft it would be doable. The main problem is that a grass runway would be heavily overgrown after a few years while a team sleeps and getting off the island might be hampered by overgrown roads and the need to wait for winter. Its either that or put in a dock for a team transporting boat.

[ArmySGT.]

The main problem with a bolt hole is the ground water level is going to be pretty high. On the plus side, the little ice age at War+150 years means a shallower Great Lakes and lower ground water.







And on the western side........... A dock capable of landing a lake barge.