Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 7, 1995 TAG: 9511070081
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.VA. LENGTH: Long
Thousands of guests and visitors at The Greenbrier resort have unwittingly attended conferences and exhibits in part of a once-secret nuclear fallout shelter for Congress that was completed during a hotel expansion in 1962.
Doomsday planners designed two auditoriums in the hotel's lower level as makeshift House and Senate chambers and an exhibit hall as a joint meeting room for a Congress-in-hiding. These have been the sites of events ranging from new-car exhibitions to meetings of the state dental society.
"The decision was made to hide the facility in plain site," Ted Kleisner, The Greenbrier's president, said Monday at a news conference called to confirm the existence of the shelter.
A 1992 story in The Washington Post that disclosed the shelter led to its decommissioning. No longer secret, the facility could not serve its intended purpose, as it could not withstand a direct bomb hit, officials said.
The Department of Defense has since stripped the facility - presumably to establish a new shelter somewhere else - and broke its $50,000-a-year lease on it last summer. Greenbrier officials waited until Monday to allow reporters inside, at which time they announced that they have reclaimed the facility but do not yet know what to do with it.
The shelter's hidden portion is a subterranean maze, equal in size to a football field, of more than 125 rooms stacked two high. It is between 20 and 64 feet underground and has walls up to 5 feet thick. Hidden doors can be shut to seal the facility from the rest of the 672-room hotel, but the point at which that would happen is barely noticeable to someone walking past.
The tour bus that shuttled reporters Monday took a snaking, wooded route that doubles as a horseback-riding trail, turned past an armed guard and stopped at a 9-foot, silver-colored door in the side of a hill. A sign, "DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE," was posted long ago to discourage the curious, hotel spokesman Ray Hoffman said.
The door opened to reveal a slab of steel and concrete weighing 25 tons that gave access to a 400-foot supply tunnel.
Had a nuclear attack been likely or imminent, members of Congress would have fled to the shelter, ordered the big door sealed, and done their part to keep the nation running. The shelter could have slept 1,080 people and fed them for about two months, officials said.
Upon entering, "you would have had any radiation washed off of you," Hoffman said, standing in a decontamination chamber with a chute for depositing street clothes and a spray device with five shower heads. Those arriving would have been issued green synthetic slacks, a white T-shirt, underclothes and tan Timberland sneakers.
The shelter was described as having cutting-edge communication gear, all of which has been removed. The system relied on a 75-foot antenna that rose out of the ground like a rocket ready for launch, its steel cover plate capable of sloughing off five tons of debris.
The nation might have seen the speaker of the house on a TV broadcast from the shelter, standing before a wall-size photograph of the Capitol and a sprig of yellow fall leaves. The photo still hangs in the shelter's TV studio.
The Greenbrier has recreated some of the shelter's original hospitallike decor by replacing some furnishings and supplies. Brown metal lockers and bunk beds stand in straight rows in one of 18 dormitories. There's an operating table and a dentist's chair in the clinic. Empty cases of a freeze-dried dish called "Rice and Chicken" were stacked eight high.
Congress, of course, never came, but caretakers made a daily habit of turning desktop calendars, purchased bestselling books for the library and preassigned lawmakers their bunks. So meticulous was their planning that the shelter staff of about 15 noted which lawmakers were overweight and assigned them lower-level bunks, Hoffman said. After each election, they reworked bunk assignments.
These federal employees worked covertly for the shelter by doubling as the hotel's television repairmen. They slipped into the shelter to maintain its communication gear through a simple white door at the rear of their cluttered TV repair shop in the hotel.
Now the $14 million shelter is a dinosaur, useless to the government that built it and kept it ready at a cost of $1 million per year, and of little benefit to the hotel, Kleisner said.
A small power plant, water and air filtration system, and incinerator stand at the ready, having never been switched on except for tests.
The Greenbrier had sought to turn the public portion of the facility into a casino, but a bill to authorize gambling at the resort died in the West Virginia legislature in March.
From the beginning, the project relied on cooperative residents and the hotel.
Federal officials asked for permission to build the facility in a 1956 letter to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Co., owners of the hotel. They found the railway, now CSX Corp., willing.
"We did it because the request was made" and the company believed it had a duty to serve the country, Kleisner said.
Residents sensed from the scope of the project that the government and national security were involved.
"No one in their right mind builds floors as thick as those," said Bennie Snyder, a local resident whose grading firm dug the hole for the bunker. Though no one told Snyder the exact reason for the hole, he said last week that he presumed it was "some type of government installation."
Snyder knew Paul E. Bugas, a former military intelligence officer who became the bunker's chief operator in 1976, as did many in the community, but several residents said they had too much respect for him to pry very hard.
"He was not supposed to [talk]. So we never bothered him too much about it. He's a gentleman," said George "Jack" Parker Jr., 77, who works at a local hardware store.
Nor did other Greenbrier employees talk, at least not often. Kleisner, the hotel president, said he would "stonewall" curious reporters who tried to get him to confirm rumors that a shelter existed.
In finally agreeing to talk publicly about the shelter he helped guard, Bugas has chastized Washington Post reporter Ted Gup, whose story disclosed the shelter to the world, for doing "a great disservice to the country." Bugas did acknowledge Gup based the story on the comments of federal officials, but Bugas stressed that the shelter could have been used for many more years.
In praising those who knew but did not tell, Bugas said, "There's an awful lot of pride and patriotism in West Virginia."
by CNB