People in Livermore, Calif., are so smart they can build nuclear weapons and compile data on the biological effects of radiation. But they can't find their own time capsule, and now they may have to rely on the Navy for help.

The San Francisco suburb is home to the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a branch of New Mexico's Sandia National Laboratories, both devoted to research on nuclear weapons and other military-related affairs. Back in 1974, town officials filled a time capsule with memorabilia, including newspapers, brochures and two bottles of locally produced wine, and buried it in a downtown park. The capsule had no set excavation date, and its site was never marked. That became a problem last week when town officials sought to unearth the capsule for a local fair-and came up empty-handed.

"Unfortunately, our collective memories are pretty poor," says Barry Schrader, co-chairman of a committee that buried the capsule as part of Livermore's centennial festivities in 1969.

As it turns out, losing a time capsule isn't so unusual. According to the International Time Capsule Society, a research center at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, the vast majority of an estimated 10,000 such capsules have been lost.

"Once it's out of sight, people tend to forget about it," says Paul Hudson, the society's co-founder.

That certainly was the case in Livermore. As Mr. Schrader recalls, the last local officials saw of the capsule was when a work crew hauled it out to the half-acre Centennial Park for burial near a wooden totem pole. "Unless they drank the wine, it should still be there," he says.

Those workers were no longer around to ask when crews started probing and digging around the totem pole on June 1. Unable to find the capsule, they went out again this week, assisted by scads of volunteers hoisting metal detectors, but still came up with nothing. Now the Navy, which has a facility at nearby Mare Island, has volunteered to assist with some of its bomb-detection equipment and is awaiting the official go-ahead from the city.

Livermore's display case for the upcoming Alameda County Fair, meanwhile, remains empty. Officials plan to begin filling it instead with items intended for a millennium capsule being buried later this year. This time, they vow to mark it. "A plaque will be embedded in concrete," Mr. Schrader says.

 

April 2, 2000