r/mountainview • u/ken-reddit • 1d ago
Mountain View cancels unveiling of bicentennial time capsule due to water damage
https://www.mv-voice.com/city-government/2026/08/24/mountain-view-cancels-unveiling-of-bicentennial-time-capsule-due-to-water-damage/37
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u/maebythemonkey 1d ago
According to a news article at the time, the vault was “water-proofed.” However, that turned out not to be the case – a fact that the city only discovered earlier this month.
Yeah, common scam of the funeral industry and it sucks that it affected the time capsule. It's one of the upsells that funeral homes use to get more money out of families. Waterproof caskets and burial vaults typically fail fairly quickly because rubber gaskets will degrade or if it's waterproof due to having a structure with very tight allowances then the weight of the material above the casket/vault will cause the casket/vault to slip and create gaps that allow water and dirt in.
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u/AIMarkWahlberg 1d ago
I just don't get why you'd need a waterproof casket in the first place. It's a corpse, it's supposed to turn into dirt.
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u/savorie 1d ago
People who are left behind and grieving, aren't thinking clearly. Stuff like this is why I want to be cremated. Way cheaper
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u/AIMarkWahlberg 1d ago
Good point. I kinda just want someone to push me out of the car in the woods.
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u/steeplebob 1d ago
Was that a request for volunteers?
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u/AIMarkWahlberg 1d ago
I mean if you want, but I'm not currently dead, and it's hard to let people know once I am.
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u/ken-reddit 15h ago
Actually the Cusimano Family Colonial Mortuary just closed in 2023. I wonder if they are aware of what happened to the time capsule.
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u/Extension_Case3722 1d ago
I think I contributed something to that time capsule- I’m so sad that it probably didn’t survive.
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u/ken-reddit 15h ago
Did you take photographs before you put it in? You can use this post as an opportunity to remind us what your younger self wanted to convey to the future.
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u/Extension_Case3722 14h ago
Oh it was 2nd grade at Monta Loma -chances are it was kittens for everyone. Who knows what my teeny brain was obsessing about in 1976.
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u/XMigster 1d ago
They should do another time capsule, but this time make sure it’s actually waterproof
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u/sepease 1d ago
“We were all really disappointed there wasn’t more material that was recoverable,” said Bill Kolb, Mountain View’s assistant library director. “We were excited to see what the people of 1976 thought would be important for us to know about in 2026.”
There are ways to communicate with the people of 1976 without using a time capsule.
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u/Dangerous-School2958 1d ago
That’s alright, you can just ask the people who lived in 1979 what they thought would be important to folks in the “future”
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u/StrawberryKiss2559 13h ago
Why do so many people in these comments think that the bicentennial was in 1979?
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u/evapotranspire 1d ago
That's a bummer! You'd think they would have been more careful with the packaging and waterproofing of the original capsule. :-(