Missile Silo Pics, with a Fallouty Flavor

Vault Maker

Vault Maker

Vault-Tec Cartographer
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This guy's blog has a bit on a Titan 1 silo complex in eastern Washington, near Moses Lake. You've seen silo shots before, but unlike most, this one has almost entirely exterior shots, and the terrain is pretty consistent with the look of the Fallout wasteland.

http://jaylake.livejournal.com/1277082.html

Titan 1 was disbanded in the mid-60s, and the sites were sold to private owners (a few were purchased by government agencies). Since they didn't have to be demolished like a lot of later systems (due to arms-control treaties with Russia), they are still semi-intact on the surface. Good source material for modders, perhaps. Inside they tend to fill with groundwater. When they were in use, they must have required sump pumps to remove the water that seeped in.

The comments at the bottom of the page include a link to a site with lots of missile silo goodness, including pictures, maps, and history:

http://www.techbastard.com/

This brings back warm, yet at the same time slightly chilling, memories of sneaking into Titan 1 complex 4C of the 851st Strategic Missile Squadron outside Chico, CA back in '93. I should scan and post those pics someday. That one had water filling it up to just below the level of the main connector tunnels, so the only part of the silos we saw were the upper chamber just below the doors...though that was about 15 meters high.

The strongest feeling I recall was that you were just a part of a huge machine, which I have only felt since in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Where the building no longer served us, but was in almost complete control.

A really odd moment came while looking through the Titan 1's old control room. Banks of large cabinets for old computers or other electronic gear lined the room, mostly empty of their parts, so they were just the sheet metal shells. Each was about a meter wide, maybe half a meter deep, and 2 meters high, and had stenciled labels for it's function. Reading along you saw "Exterior Lights", "Interior Lights", "Primary Ventilation", "Security Perimter", and all kinds of mundane things, until you got to "Target Grid Orange", "Target Grid Green"... I haven't a chill like that since (on the same trip to DC as the Holocaust Mus.) I saw the Enola Gay in the workshops of the Smithsonian, and actually got to lean inside the fuselage about 2-3 meters from the cradle for The Bomb.

Ok, "sharing" is over now.
 
Ah-Teen said:
Hey cool. Next time I'm around Washington I might just have to get there.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't recommend that. These silos are filled with pretty much everything you don't want to touch / breath (=asbestos etc.). I have read several reports about visits and the funny thing is, they never found anything living down there. No animals :D

Photos will be great...
 
Such as much as I guessed. I wouldn't go in without protection. At the very least a resperator and a buddy. Probably a little radiation if it's where I think it is. Probably still wont get anymore radiation than living at my altitude.
 
Not being an Urb Explo ninja, I went in with 2 friends, a cheap 35mm camera with 1000-speed film (but highest camera shutter speed only 400) and one flashlight. I would recommend you have more than 1 flashlight. That could have made for Darwin award level stupidity if anything went wrong. If you want to take pics, several bright lights would help. Some rooms and tunnels that would make good shots are about 50 meters across (or long), so camera flashbulbs aren't much good.

Shouldn't the Darwin award be the Fundamentalist Award? Or Fishhead Award? "For those folks who know that evolution is something that just happened to other people."

Respirators might be a good idea, but we just crawled in and started roaming. The Chico complex was partly excavated for some reason, so there was a pit next to what was (I think) a fuel manifold chamber with a hole just big enough to crawl through. Local explorers/delinquents had dragged aluminum conduit rack into position to use as ladders to get from the lower level of the manifold to the main tunnel level. Getting out was easier, we just ascended the 15 meter high staircase by the freight elevator, unlatched the heavy metal door, and walked out. (Why was the only door latched from the inside when lots of other people had obviously been in there?)

Recent pics on Google Earth looked like the entire Chico site had been cleared and flattened not long before the imagery was taken, so I don't expect it's as easy to get in anymore.

I know there are some airborne hazards underground, but really. Radon in western US sites is not likely to be an issue. I don't recall anything that looked like friable asbestos, and even if there was, you'd have to disturb it somehow to inhale it. That leaves mold and fungi, but worries about that in shoddy American construction have proven pretty overblown. I think the reason you don't find anything alive in these is that there isn't any food source to speak of. For those of us who don't make a habit of Urb Explo and expose ourselves to that stuff all the time, some of the concerns raised seem a bit apoplectic. I mean, I'm still here. Apart from a sixth toe, growing a second pud from out of my foreskin like the teeth of Alien, and having one nad shrivel up and grow out through my navel, I'm still kind of healthy.

I'd like to think of myself as Post Apoplectic. Cowboy the F up and get in there!
 
Just posted the first pic to the gallery in Post Apoc Location Photos...pending mod approval. I need to finish scanning/cropping the rest. I'll also make up a graphic using one of the existing silo plans on the net, so you can see about where each image is taken. Expect to see those up in about a week.
 
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