The Diefenbunker “Canada’s Cold War Museum is now, after many years of restoration and acquisition of rare and valuable artifacts, safe, well lit and open to the public and well worth a visit, (I returned with my wife after Canada Day 2017 and on one of the walls is a board describing where most of the Government bunkers were) but I will never forget my first visit to what once was a dark, mysterious and a bit creepy place….I almost got lost coming back from a washroom while trying to locate Mark and our guide Peter, from the echoing sounds of their voices in this labyrinth of dim tunnels deep within the earth. We were introduced to a man named Peter, who use to work there, in the office area which was one of the few areas that were well lit. After warning us to be careful as it was dark inside and had water on the floor in some places, we were led down into a semi dark netherworld with flickering lights. (I was just staring at him, amazed at his nerve, but to my disbelief, Katherine H. She told us that it would be open as a museum sometime in the future, but not now as they were just getting started, and we would have to leave….After some fast talking by Mark “My friend here is a member of the Toronto Aerospace Museum and he’d like to come in and have a look around”. Anyway we slid in to the grounds through an opening in the wire and were wandering toward what looked like air vents, when the side of a small hill began to open up…We stood there staring at what seems to be grass on a door that was opening….We were surprised to see a woman on the other side and she was a little shocked to see us standing there inside an off limits government property. I was not in favour of such an intrusion as we were now in our early 40s. We could see some structures in the distance and Mark noticed an opening in the fence.”Hey do ya wanna sneak in like we used to do in other places when we were kids ?” said Mark. We had gone there just to look at the site, it had been decommissioned and was closed to the public. I think it must have been around 1997-98. Security contractors are searching for cleared people to fill a growing number of positions such as monitoring top secret websites, private polygraph examiner employment opportunities, IT security jobs, and employment security requiring a variety of security clearance levels. ![]() The Diefenbunker was a fascinating and eerie place when I and my friend Mark first got a look inside. We work to connect cleared people with cleared facilities. Sealed up and silent and now for sale, this remote second bunker buried beneath the ground continues to be shrouded secrecy, whose adversary is no longer the blast of a nuclear bomb, but the encroaching elements of nature that will one day consume this relic of our Cold War past, or maybe someone will make it into a nice cottage retreat.įrom author’s originally published artcile in the Ottawa Citizen, May 2015 An unusual length of piled earth led to what looked to be a containment reservoir for water, with its irrigation and pumping equipment silently rusting away in the 20 years it has been abandoned. It still would have contained all the equipment and necessities for personnel to continue military and government communications during a nuclear attack. ![]() A sketch of how the government bunker facility may have looked when it was in operation until 1994.īelow the mound and hatches would have been a 2 story bunker complex, similar to the one in Carp but only at half the height.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |