North Bay underground complex“a place that was once full of life waiting for death”

I had the opportunity to spend a week in the former underground complex through my place of employment. We were asked to do a complete inventory of all the rooms in the complex this included: fluorescent lighting, floor, ceiling and wall material, fire detection devices, mercury switches and thermometers. Other members of the team took samples of paint, wall, floor and ceiling material as well as pipe insulation. All this was done so a comprehensive report could be written on what materials the complex was made of. The UGC as it is know was conceived in the early years of the Cold War (1950’s) and from what I understand, it was to be a complementary control center to the one the US has in Colorado. The control center was built to monitor the DEW line, that was built in Canada’s Arctic to provide North America with an early warning of planes coming from the USSR. It is a three story building in the shape of the number (8)eight built several hundred feet underground. Having been built in the early 1960’s when asbestos and PCB’s (paint) were OK as far as being used for construction materials and mercury was the indicator of choice in thermometers. The survey was to be extensive. Everything and anything to do with classified military items along with every piece of furniture had already been removed before our visit, if you watch the you tube video, http://youtu.be/y3cQUGhLmFw you will see a lot of things that had been removed before our visit. My co-worker and I started out by going to each room and noting the colour and type of tile used on the floor, wall material; mostly asbestos mill board, some had dry wall covering the asbestos so that stuff could be mounted to the walls. On these walls were 14x17 inch pictures of cork board indicating that items could be stuck or fastened

to those walls. The ceilings for the majority of the rooms were of the suspended tile type. All lighting fixtures were counted as well as the fire detection devices. We managed to cover one floor a day, the roof on the fourth day and the generator room and underneath the complex the last day. There were a few notable rooms: The main control/command room had been populated with rows of desks, all gone, the screens up near the ceiling at the front were of the rear protection type. I would imagine that this is where the report would come from every Christmas Eve that some thing had been picked up on radar coming from the North Pole every time it turned out to be Santa Clause, growing up I remember hearing these reports on the radio and TV. The generator complex, just next to the three story building is in its own cavern. At one time it housed six large generators, since replaced with three modern generators. It also held the machinery that kept the complex running and still does. The extremely large Bell room that at one time had held all the banks of switching relays and equipment, it was at least 20 ft high, by 30 ft wide and over 90 ft long. All the racks and equipment were gone except for a dozen varnished wooden ladders that reached from the floor to the ceiling and ran along rails attached to the ceiling. If one did not know about older central office switching technology they would wonder what this room had been for, the chopped at the floor level cables might have given it away though. Bell also had another room, much smaller and similarly void of most of it’s former equipment except for one rack that held fiber optic switches. The rooms’ stand out feature was that it was completely lead

lined, floor, ceiling and walls, the door was shielded as well with springy brass weather striping to prevent communications from getting out. Almost all of the flooring was ceramic tile or linoleum flooring, the only real exception was a few officers rooms. There were two sitting/bedrooms next to the control/command room, one for an American general and one for a Canadian general. The floor covering was wall to wall carpeting, but in the bathroom, the Canadian one had a tiled floor while the American one a beautiful patterned marble floor. To finish on a Christmas theme, there was somewhat of a mural painted on one of the remote hallways probably done by some of the last remaining people of the hundreds that had populated the place 24/7/365 for over 40 years.The mural starts out with an Igloo the opening of which being an actual door, then a skeleton with a Santa hat and a candy cane. Above that a modern day fighter aircraft shooting an Air to Air missile at Santa’s sleigh. But Santa picked this up on his Heads up warning display and you see him safely parachuting to earth with his bag of toys, just near where he is going to land is the Easter Bunny (someone must of had their holidays mixed up), then there is a snowman, a Christmas tree, a fireplace and and at the very last a very large snowman. It is a place that few non-military people get to visit. I feel lucky that I was able to visit one of the places that I had heard about, having grown up in the Cold War era.