Word: fema
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Mount Weather is operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which for years has fended off inquiries about the installation with a firm "no comment." Jokes Bob Blair, a FEMA spokesman: "I'll be glad to tell you all about it, but I'd have to kill you afterward." Officially, the Mount Weather bunker does not exist; it is not mentioned in FEMA's published budget. "Even I don't know much about it, and I'm head of FEMA's congressional affairs," says David Cole. "A lot of it is in the black ((secret)) program...
...FEMA's internal telephone directory, Mount Weather is referred to simply as SF, for Special Facility, and that is what it is called by all who are assigned there. "I was ((at the agency)) for almost two years before I heard the term Mount Weather," says Julius Becton, who headed FEMA from 1985 to 1989. The installation has no street address, merely a post-office box in Berryville, Va., a sleepy hamlet eight miles away...
...facility, according to Fowler, could be closed off with a so-called guillotine gate; behind it is a solid steel door that Fowler estimates is 5 ft. thick, 10 ft. high and nearly 20 ft. across. It rests on wheels and can be opened and closed electronically. Says former FEMA head Becton: "The entrance is such that if they were to pop a nuke, it would withstand whatever they popped...
...National Security Council staff member says the consensus among people who think about the unthinkable is that Washington is a potential target for nuclear attack -- even outside a cold war framework -- because any foe would be tempted "to decapitate" the U.S. government by killing its leaders. In recent years FEMA has shifted the focus from a potential Soviet attack to one by a Third World nation or even a terrorist group with access to a crude nuclear device. Other scenarios that might trigger an evacuation to Mount Weather, according to a former FEMA official, would be the poisoning of Washington...
Nevertheless, FEMA has become a convenient target for all the frustrations people feel. In the rural community of Awendaw (pop. 200), the Rev. Jonathan C. Roberts of the Greater Zion A.M.E. Church defied FEMA by setting up temporary trailers for his congregation -- on land where the flood plain is lowest. "They told me, 'You bring those trailers in here, we'll lock you up,' " says Roberts. "I told them, 'Meet me at the county line.' " Such confrontations have taken a toll on FEMA officials. Says relief officer Paul E. Hall: "No one likes to be called a jackass...