Cache is hidden in the game game lands - PLEASE WEAR ORANGE! Consider saving these caches for a Sunday - there is no hunting in PA on Sundays.
This cache is part of the Ghosts Of Alvira series. Part of the code needed for the final will be in this cache.
There's a wide path here leading most of the way to the cache. You will need to bushwack the last few feet - be prepared for some thorns, and high grass even on the path.
"Open for only eleven months, the bomb factory was closed after the gov't realized they had overestimated the amount of explosives necessary, therefore sitting dormant for the last years of WWII. The bunkers built in the woods behind the factory, however, remain."
It turns out the Pennsylvania Ordnance Works was used for more than making munitions.
Local historian Stephen C. Huddy has confirmed as he explored the role the facility played in the war that it was used to store radioactive material from the Manhattan Project from which the atom bomb was developed.
Under top secret war-time conditions, 50 tons of uranium metal turnings in 1943 and
1944 were stored in sealed drums in four of the 150 concrete igloos built to house the TNT, he said.
Neither the workers making TNT nor the public knew the ordnance works also was being used as a radioactive waste dump site, said Huddy, a retired Williamsport Area High School principal.
Huddy said he and his wife Martha in 2009 during research at the National Archives in College Park, Md., discovered a 1987 letter from the then director of facilities and site decommissioning projects for the Office of Nuclear Energy.
The letter stated the ordnance site was one of 22 in the nation that was believed to have the highest potential for radiological contamination.
That conclusion, it stated, was based on historical material from the Manhattan Energy District and the Atomic Energy Commission.
It shocked him to find out the uranium turnings, or waste, had been shipped across the country from New Mexico where nuclear experiments were taking place, he said.
The link to the Manhattan Project was Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves and Col. Kenneth Nichols, both of whom were directly responsible for the construction of the ordnance works, he said.
Groves became head of the Manhattan Energy District and Nichols headed up the Oak Ridge Lab in Tennessee, he said.
Wasn't in operation long
Through his research, Huddy said he uncovered documents that show in 1943, the same year production of TNT started, the radioactive waste was stored in at least four of the igloos built to store TNT.
In August 2013, Huddy said eight pages related to the Manhattan Project he received upon request from the state Game Commission shed a dramatic new light on the White Deer Valley saga.
One was a 1943 Army Engineers tally sheet showing 36 barrels of uranium turnings totaling 19,211 pounds would be received at the ordnance works that September.
A second document notified the ordnance works that a fourth and final shipment of 17,000 pounds of radioactive debris would be received in the next three to four weeks.
There is no apparent record of the first two shipments that totaled 32,000 pounds, Huddy said. He said he believes the War Department lost track of its shipments of the radioactive waste.
By October 1943, removal of the radioactive material had begun, according to Huddy. Records he has seen state the final shipment was April 26, 1944, or 11 days after the ordnance works was decommissioned.
There have been a number of environment studies over the years in an effort to determine if there were any unexploded shells or radioactive contamination.
In May 2011, the state Department of Environmental Protection's Bureau of Radiation performed gamma radiation scans on roadways on state game land. It later did the same on two igloos on the game land that had been identified as holding the uranium shavings in barrels.
The scans found no indication of uranium or other gamma-emitting radioactive elements above the natural background levels, the report states. The Bureau of Prisons did not permit scans of two igloos on its land, DEP said.