I recently went to the Mega cavern in Louisville, Kentucky. As the sign on the right states, which is just inside the entrance of the cavern, the mega cavern is dubbed as a large and green ‘building’. So what exactly is a cavern? A cavern is simply a man-made cavern.
So what makes this such a green place? From the official Louisville Mega Cavern website:
It was created by a massive limestone quarry—with miners blasting out a mind-boggling amount of rock for over 42 years during the middle of the 20th century. It was acquired in 1989 by private investors who saw the potential to develop a portion of the cavern into an environmentally-conscious high security commercial storage facility. For the past 17 years, a massive amount of recycled concrete, brick, block, rock and dirt were (and continue to be) off-loaded at the cavern to fill in the holes and create floors and internal roads. Construction to carve out offices and storage spaces is ongoing, making just a dent in the more than 4,000,000 square feet of space. Even though it’s underground, the Louisville MEGA Cavern is actually the largest building in the state of Kentucky—and by tonnage is the largest recycling center in the state. Now you can experience all the wonder and adventure of this unique attraction.
In addition to that is the worm recycling which occurs deep inside the cavern. The photo below shows this. On a simple bed of shredded paper, paper towels and other miscellaneous other goodies for a multitude of worms to feast on. The worms loves this stuff. They eat their own weight every day resulting in a lot of waste. Well, their waste makes great organic fertilizer.
There are numerous interesting facts about this cavern. One of the most interesting is the fact that MGM has a storage room. Among its many items in storage is the original film of The Wizard of Oz. One of the other more interesting factoids is it was designed to be a bomb shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The below photo showing the replica that was made showing the many people who could have lived down there until it was safe to get back out. It was kind of creepy to me. Mannequins and dummies bother me. Am I alone in that?
Most of the cavern in directly under the Louisville Zoo. Anyway, it was a pretty cool experience and if you are ever in the Louisville area a visit to the Louisville Mega Cavern should be discussed.
For more information or to visit, go to the Louisville Mega Cavern website
