TULSA, Okla. — Hundreds watched Friday as a crane lifted a muddy package from a hole in the courthouse lawn: a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere buried to celebrate Oklahoma’s 50 years of statehood.
The wrapped car — a gold and white two-door hardtop — appeared brown and red as it came out of the hole, but it was unclear whether the color represented dirt or rust. A bit of shiny chrome was visible on the bumper.
The car spent the last half-century covered in three layers of protective material and encased in a 12-by-20-foot concrete vault, supposedly tough enough to withstand a nuclear attack.
The car was placed on a flatbed truck so it could be unwrapped, spruced up and officially unveiled Friday evening at the Tulsa Convention Center. Spectators packed the streets to glimpse its journey.
A nuclear explosion is one thing but rust is another.
But event officials already had to pump out several feet of water from its crypt.
| I doubt there’s much left of it unless they did one hell of a job of wrapping it up. It was probably sitting in a few feet of water for almost the whole 50 years. |
| Original post. |
Now I have to go home and watch Christine again.
S.King – har, har!
A friend of mine is there right now.
Our local papers here in Oklahoma gave a little more details: Apprantley a HASMAT crew went in first when the crypt was first open to check for any hazardous materials. The HASTMAT crew said that there were indications that the crypt had been completely full of water and that the car may have spent a large amount of its time under waters during its solitutde.
Ok…who’se the U-Boat Commander?
IF,
They took the time to do it RIGHT, the engine should still start…
Sitting under water it shouldn’t rust, for rust you need oxygen. Most likely the water level fluctuated causing the rust.
So how did we humans do over the course of 50 years to make a leak proof container?
I’ll be looking for details so I can know who to appoint to the nuclear waste disposal design team.
“This thing all things devours
birds, beasts, trees, flowers.
Gnaws iron, bites steel, grinds hard stones to meal
slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down.”
What chance did this poor thing ever have?
Oops, I posted on the old link. Let me try again:
“Maybe we ought to put a can of gasoline in with the car,’’ said capsule chairman Lewis Roberts. “Who knows – maybe cars of that time will run on solar power or uranium or something.’’
NOT. Fifty years ago, I am sure they expected flying anti-gravity cars running on tap water by 2007. I’m still waiting for mine.
I bet this thing disintegrates to dust now that it is exposed to oxygen.
On NBC they had some footage from when it was placed in the ground. It looked like they covered it with cement, so may be there is a chance. I mean, hell, salvagers were able to bring up a B-25 out of Lake Murray a couple of years ago!.
#5 I’m waiting for the wheeze groaning sound myself.!
Yep… we can now confidently bury our nuclear waste knowing that it will not come in contact with water for at least 50,000 years. After all, 50 years seems to be a good engineering proof test, and the design performed magnificently (if gathering water was the purpose of this project.)
Ahhhhh, I don’t quite think that a cheesy civic stunt by the City of Tulsa was intended as a controlled scientific test of nuclear waste containment.
…but I could be wrong…
#12 – Just change your name to hack. What a piss poor post.
You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to… either way, as they say, “You got that right, girlfriend!”
youtude link http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=buriedcar
I can only hope that they don’t decide to leave it this way. Do they realise that if that live rust is allowed to grow, there literally will be no car left at-all. Kill the rust, restore, & display/sell I say. Anyway, surely it wouldn’t be that rusted anyway, would it? It’s in fresh water, underground with very, very little air, no heat & totally submerged. To create rust you need 3 key ingredients, air, water & heat. None of these things are there. I think it’s just filthy & the interior’s rotted. No worse than that. They’d be stupid to “keep it this way”. Oh-please…get real! Otherwise it’ll die once unearthed.
Here’s a picture of the Belvedere on display.
http://thedigitalimage.org/buried_plymouth_belvedere.jpg
I hope they don’t replace the excavated area with a new time capsule that will be opened in another 50 years. I don’t think any new vault made of stronger materials will hold up, in 50 years a repeat will occur and we’ll have another rusted heap for a car. Sure they could make the vault with some expensive materials costing tens of thousands of dollars but I doubt they want to spend that kind of money on it. How about if they just make a small foot-wide sturdy box and bury that?