Michael Loewinger

News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm.

But our focus is something that was buried in the reports.

When TV crews arrived at the crash site, they discovered, rather ominously, that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of federal security agents.

the crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly guarded Cold War secret.

Inside Mount Weather was a massive, covert facility, and somehow that undersells it.

Through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain and behind a 34-ton blast door lies a subterranean, strange Lovian lair, a freestanding city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant, and even a broadcasting studio.

Everything that the White House and thousands of federal workers would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface.

I expect your people to save our government.

That's what President Dwight Eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in 1955.

It's still operated by FEMA today.

It's actually being renovated as I speak.

But back in the 1950s, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCDA, which poured billions into making America nuke-proof, or at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation, they might survive atomic hellfire.

The FCDA was behind this delightful, if slightly morbid, PSA, instructing schoolchildren to hide under their desks during bomb drills.

And Bert the turtle was very alert.

When danger threatened him, he never got hurt.

He knew just what to do.

He ducked.

For adults, the FCDA organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises where millions of people acted out the day of their likely demise, emptying the streets of America's biggest cities.

Operation Alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action.

Kept secret until that terrible plane crash in 1974.