Water barrel for a fallout shelter from the Cold War era seen in a flea market.

After reading the bottom portion, I have to wonder which substance might this container be filled with 🤔

Yeah, I feel like there should definitely be a law that anything that serves as both a refillable drinking container and a commode needs to have a sharpie attached to it that you can use to mark that it has been converted over to commode mode.
The plastic liner would protect it anyways if you reuse it, so not really an issue if you can’t see anything?
- Yeah I'd rather not drink water out of a container that once held shit on principle.
- It's a issue of taste...

Regarding the second picture...

I gauran-damn-tee that every last pharmaceutical in those kits has been expired at least 7 years, and
the "made with military grade" shelf-stable meals (they're not military MRE's) - means they were made as cheaply as legally possible to still be called "food".

Peppers are a strange lot. My kid's ex's dad kept 2,000lbs of dry beans in his house 'just in case.' Didn't have a functioning furnace, hot water heater, or stove - but made sure to check on his bean inventory every week.

Peppers are a strange lot.
- Damnit. Fuck it. I'm committed to it now.
The fuel hoarders crack me up. Like, y'all know that has a shelf life, right?

It reminds me of Fallout.

There might be a reason for that.
The barrel was in episode 5 of Fallout.
- Did the sharpie writing indicate that it had been converted to commode mode?

The "to dispense" instructions are interesting. Put a tube 3/4 of the way into the water, pinch it, and then "pull downward 12 to 18 inches"... good way to create a vacuum and start the siphon action without putting your mouth on the tube.

We acknowledge that you may use this container for refuse. And we've decided to write "DRINKING WATER" on the side in big text, just in case you don't.

That's a really nice font and well-laid-out text blocks.

They didn't half-ass it when it came to armageddon back then.

I found a barrel just like that at an estate sale a few weeks ago! Part of me wanted it just because it looked cool.

There was one just like it at my old high school‘s auditorium that was used as a trash can. I have very fond memories of seeing it at drama club. I shared it with a lot of my friends, and even my old teacher, who I’m still in touch with, and everyone enjoyed seeing it.

We had a dozen of those when I was a kid, along with a bunch of aluminum tins containing the nastiest soda crackers you can possibly imagine. The civil defense water barrels were very useful but the “food” was something you’d only eat if there was no alternative.

huh, it was made in my state of Ohio too, neat!

I may or may not have first hand knowledge that there are a bunch of those barrels in the abandoned subway in Cincinnati...

It must have been a designated fallout shelter. This was part of a whole concept that people would go into places like that in large masses and wait out the nukes. My alma mater had a supposed fallout shelter in one of the buildings' stairwells. There were big signs up telling everyone that a stairwell with huge windows on every floor was a fallout shelter.
- It definitely was. There may have been corridors and bathrooms that were absolutely packed full of disassembled bunk beds.

That's a good price for that IFAK/Trauma kit. That exact one is $110 on Amazon.

Makes a handy piss jug after drinking all the water. Even has instructions right on the tin!

I have a big thing of "biscuits" from a cold war fallout shelter. Government one, I remember that much. I gotta go find that thing sometime.

I thought about cracking it open and trying a biscuit, but honestly it was in pretty rough shape. I kinda doubted the biscuits would be edible, and if that was the case I would have just ruined the can further for nothing.

You should take a look at SteveMRE1989 on YouTube to see how long those packaged foods can last. He's eaten rations from the early 1900s without issue usually. It's pretty wild how well packaged some of that stuff was
- Oh I love that dude! "Nice hiss. Let's get this out onto a tray." He will dead ass stop mid chew like, "yeah that's foul." Then go back for another bite.
  
  The issue with the biscuits is that the can is very very rusty in some spots. The biscuits aren't the failure point the can is lol.

Many fallout shelters also had food rations and cots that doubled as stretchers (they had handles at the top and bottom). A few even had radios and Geiger counters.