LAKEVIEW (WGNO) – New Orleans adventurer Mike Kennedy and his two friends explored the abandoned bomb shelter in Lakeview back in 2006.
“We thought other people might want to see this, so that’s why we recorded it,” says Kennedy.
The twists and turns in Kennedy’s video showcase an underground world far removed from our own. But old photographs from city archives paint a much different picture.
“They built this underground to hold almost 300 people, and the idea was you could take shelter there if you had enough warning, survive a bomb blast and actually run New Orleans from this shelter,” says University of New Orleans history department chair Robert Dupont.
Dupont calls the Lakeview bomb shelter a “reflection of the times.”
He says the Office of Civil Defense built the shelter in the 1960s during the height of the Cold War.
The shelter was used during Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and since then has been abandoned for almost 40 years.
“Every second I was in there I was about to kill it, let’s get out of here, but we just kept going further and further until we eventually saw everything,” says Kennedy.
Click here to see Kennedy’s videos.