Exploring the Ark Two Nuclear Shelter with Bruce Beach | Buried School Bus Shelter
Exploring the Ark Two Nuclear Shelter with Bruce Beach. Bruce Beach buried 42 school busses in 1980 & built a 10,000sq ft nuclear bunker 14 feet underground
This is Bruce Beach
This, is Bruce Beach
In 1980 Bruce Beach dug a giant hole on his property and built a 10,000 square foot nuclear shelter out of 42 school buses.
In the summer of 2019 I called Mr. Beach and I asked if I could get a tour of the shelter, we landed on a date and he said the only stipulation is that I give him 3-4 hours of help. I didn’t know what that meant, but I agreed.
On an early morning in July of 2019 I arrived at the Beach residence, he was making us breakfast. A white egg sauce on toast with egg yolks on toast.
Bruce lives in Hornings Mills Ontario with his lovely wife Jean, Jean’s family has lived in Hornings Mills for over 200 years.
After Bruce and I got acquainted, finished our breakfast and chatted about his life’s accomplishments he asked me to come out and help him start the lawn mower. I saw where this was going, so I did the right thing and moved his lawn for him, as you can see here.
After cutting Bruce’s lawn, stacking wood and prepping a garden for his wife Bruce brought me a drink called Dr Zip, which is a knock off of Dr Pepper and Bruce has cases of it! Over the course of my time with Bruce I probably drank 5 Dr Zips!
Pulling in to the Ark Two Shelter property, he handed me the keys to unlock the gate, we drove inside and Bruce had me stop the car and take a run through the woods to see the 50 foot waterfall and stream that was once the site of a mill. Bruce explained to me in great detail how we has planned to build a system to utilize water from the river for the Ark.
We proceed to the parking lot, or truck loading area of the property that contains a small green concrete entry way with a thick steel door. Bruce shows me the two time capsules that contain his plans for how to reconstruct society after the nuclear fallout including how to maintain government relations, instructions on building a new international language institute (similar to the current United Nations) and a scale model of International Language Institute headquarters.
Bruce then gave me instructions and directions on where to go to find and start the generator that powers up the entire ark 2 shelter. With only a flashlight I enter the dark and damp shelter, I make my way down 14 feet below earth in search of a knee high opening where i will crawl through and then back up a ladder to the generator room.
Bruce meets me at the door and he shows me how to start up the generator.
We spend a good 20 to 30 minutes at the entrance of the Ark Two Shelter as Bruce tells me all about the history, the building of the shelter, he tells me how the shelter is meant to be run by women to raise and protect children in order to help rebuild a society after a nuclear bomb etc. You can see this whole exchange in the video of this experience posted above.
We begin our tour, moving down the gradual sloping ramp at the entrance followed by a sharp turn left and down into the Ark Two Nuclear Shelter
Inside the Ark Two Nuclear Shelter
An interesting tidbit on the design of this entrance, Bruce has advised that nuclear radiation is a form of light and It travels only in a straight line. Radiation cannot go around corners, so the main entrance of the shelter was purposely built as a straight ramp down followed by a hard 90 degree turn down and into the shelter. By Bruce’s calculations this would stop any radiation from coming in the main entry and into the shelter.
As I explore and navigate you can really see how much time and effort Bruce has put into the shelter. With the core focus being on a shelter run by women and designed to raise and protect children there are hints of that all throughout the rooms. In this bathroom, there are several standard sinks and toilets as well as smaller ones for the children to use. In addition to the washroom, there is also a childs play area, a nursery with a “quiet room” or crying children and child sized bunks made for kids to sleep 2 per bunk with a head at each end, Bruce said the kids would sleep for 12 hours at a time and then change sleeping shifts.
The Creepy and Apocalyptic Horror Dentists Office in the Ark Two Shelter
Bruce was not in the least bit surprised at my excitement when he showed me the dentists office in the shelter. He said everyone gets either excited or terrified when they see the old dentists chair, rusty equipment and old x-ray machine. I have no doubt that, if needed, this dentists office and equipment would work just as well as it did in the 1980’s when it was built…I just hope he has a good supply of nova-cane, sedative, pain killer and cleaning materials!!
This dentists office in the Ark is a perfect horror movie set, but this is no set – this is a legitimate and operational dentists office…..from hell!
About Bruce Beach
Bruce Beach was born in Winfield, Kansas and raised mostly in Wellington, Kansas where a number of his offspring still live. He moved to Canada in 1970 to teach in the Northern College System, after having previously taught in black colleges in the U.S.
Bruce told me that he spent a year in the Arctic as a control tower operator, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. He has traveled to China and extensively in South America and more recently to Europe. Bruce has over 20 descendants (children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren), several of which live in Taiwan and the rest in the U.S. and Canada.
Bruce once owned a very large research ship called Canada’s Tomorrow and he was one third owner of the company that built the robotic arm that recovered the space shuttle Challenger. One of the company’s robotic arms is in the Smithsonian.
Bruce considers himself an optimist about the long term future of mankind but a pessimist about the immediate future. He is greatly interested in religion, being a class taught student of Christian Science and a persistent student of the writings of Emannuel Swedenborg for almost fifty years.
At one time Bruce termed himself a Zen Buddhist and has read many translations of both the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran. Bruce also thoroughly studied the Mormon religion and the Jehovah’s Witness religion and says he truly appreciates them all.
Bruce met his wife Jean at the Baha’i Temple in Wilmette, Illinois which is just outside Chicago. She was guiding at the front door and has been guiding him ever since. Together they have over a century of service to the Baha’i Faith
Bruce Beach is a humble and peaceful man with an infectious laugh and a larger than life personality. When I first asked Bruce what his profession was, he said he is an inventor, but that his wife would argue about to what degree of success.
Having devoted his life to science and religion, having spent time in the arctic, having travelling the world and having built a large family, Bruce Beach will go down in the history books as the man who built a nuclear bunker 14 feet underground out of 42 school busses. And why did he do this?? Because he just wants to make the world a better place and for society to continue in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
The Passing of Bruce and Jean Beach
Less than two years after my visit, the man who planned to outlive the end of the world passed away himself. Bruce Mansfield Beach died on May 10, 2021, at age 87. He had a heart attack, and he left behind an ailing wife, five grown children, the massive bunker, and a set of half-finished plans for a new world, with no instructions for carrying on without him. His funeral arrangements were handled by Jack and Thompson Funeral Home in nearby Shelburne.
His obituary sums Bruce up better than I could. It describes him as an eccentric, a futurist, an iconoclast, a visionary, an inventor, a professor, and a devout Bahá’í. It ends with the name Bruce chose for himself: “The Dawnsayer.” It also confirms what Bruce told me about the land. The first school bus went into the ground in 1979, on land that had belonged to Jean’s family since the turn of the 20th century. The family asked that any donations go to National Service Dogs.
Those who knew him say the “doomsday bunker guy” label never captured who he was. Melancthon Township Mayor Darren White, whose township includes Horning’s Mills, called Bruce a forward thinker and a great negotiator and barterer, and said it was a loss for the community to lose someone with so much character and local colour. His daughter Bahia summed up his trade policy perfectly. He wouldn’t take your money, but if you wanted his time, you had to give him yours. That was exactly my experience: a mowed lawn, a stacked woodpile and five Dr Zips.
Bruce’s Final Resting Place
Bruce never really left the Ark. According to Antonia Lau, a longtime friend of Bruce, he was buried on the property near the Ark, beside his son who died before him. That son was Bahji. Bruce and Jean had three children together, and one of them died in a sledding accident at age eight. A memorial on the property, “Bahji Du Canada,” honours him. After Bruce died, Lau took over his long-running prepper newsletter, which reached about 2,000 people worldwide. She also ran a GoFundMe for Jean to cover the funeral and a new wood stove for the house.
Jean Beach: Our Walking Angel
Jean followed Bruce less than a year later. Her obituary opens: “Our Walking Angel has been called home. And she would say ‘About Time.’” Jean Evelyn Leone (Gallaugher) Beach died at home on April 8th, 2022, at age 94, with family at her side. She was born in Melancthon Township on June 23rd, 1927, to Evelyn and Bonnar Gallaugher. She grew up on the farm, and during the school week she and her sisters boarded in Shelburne, going home on weekends.
Anyone who visited the Beach home knows the next line is true. Bruce brought people into their home, but Jean made sure everyone was fed and taken care of. She belonged to the Women’s Institute for more than 50 years, and she loved gardening, natural health and painting. That garden I prepped for her that morning makes a little more sense now. She is survived by her children Bahia Beach Eldner of Innisfil and Bonnar Beach of Barrie, and by her stepchildren Timothy Beach in Texas and Brenda Steward and Brian Beach in Kansas.
What Happens to the Ark Two Now?
This is the big unanswered question. People close to Bruce say he never planned for his own death, because he expected to live through the coming catastrophe and lead the reconstruction afterward. After his death, Bahia said she and her siblings were taking their time with what their father left behind. They expected to form a committee to divide up his most interesting projects, and at that point no one was the obvious heir to the bunker. Lau said she hoped the Ark would stay in the family, but she admitted it needs a lot of repair work.
The township has history with the Ark. Its official position was that the property could be used but people could not be inside the bunker, which, as Mayor White put it, didn’t generally stop Bruce from having people in the bunker. White said the fire chief at one point would weld the entrance shut, and before he was even out of the driveway, Bruce would be cutting the weld off. After Bruce’s death, White said the township had no plans to issue unilateral orders and would work with the family. He also noted that the bunker would probably make the property hard to sell, and that digging it up or sealing it off would be a significant project.
As far as I can find, there has been no public record of the property being sold, demolished or reopened since then. The Ark Two, with Bruce resting beside it, seems to sit quietly where he left it.
The Dawnsayer
If you want more of Bruce’s story, filmmaker Paul Marc Kell spent eight years documenting him for the feature documentary The Dawnsayer, released in 2021. A Film Threat review said the film shows Beach is no average doomsday prepper, and described the Ark Two by then as neglected, with an aging Bruce and Jean living on the edge of poverty
