My Tour of NORAD

Hi everybody.

Been a while since I last posted, but between a new job and a daughter learning to walk, I haven't had a lot of time lately. But I got to do something last week that I just had to share with you guys, since only a bunch of people who also grew up on a diet of Cold War thrillers and action movies will really appreciate how cool it was.

My wife called me at work and told me that one of the chaplains at the military base in North Bay, Ontario, just up the highway from us, was setting up a tour of their NORAD complex for some of the local clergy. Would I like to go along?

Silly question.

I'm not from around here. Until last week, I had no idea that Canada's piece of NORAD was based in North Bay, but they've had an underground complex there for almost 50 years. I figured we were going to see a cool underground bunker. Little did I know that this was the Canadian counterpart to Cheyenne Mountain. Not quite as big or fancy, but one of the coolest places I've ever been. They're in the process of shutting it down, because everything's been moved into a new building above ground. Apparently, they're not too worried about being nuked anymore, and if they were, today's nukes pack a much bigger punch than the ones fifty years ago. We learned on the tour that it was built to withstand a three-megaton blast, which is not so big when you think about it. At the end of the day, the cool factor of being underground could not compare with the convenience of being able to just walk in and out the door, the ability to see what the weather is doing, or the lower cost to the taxpayer.

Unlike its Colorado counterpart, the North Bay complex is not in a mountain. It's over 600 feet below ground (everything up here is thin soil over solid granite), and you'd never suspect it was there to look at the place. Our group went in through a gatehouse and caught a bus that shuttles people up and down all day. We drove down a ramp and into a tunnel that was sort of a large steel culvert with a garage door at the end. This was the north portal. The door opened and there was a dimly-lit, granite-walled tunnel sloping down into the distance. What was really unreal was the speed the bus travels. This thing has about a foot of clearance on each side, and the driver really stepped on it. It was over a mile of driving to the bottom, and we did it in a couple of minutes.

The tunnel eventually widened into a larger, brighter cavern where we stopped. If we'd kept going, it would have sloped upward toward the south portal, the idea being that a nuclear blast would travel straight through the tunnel. The entrances to the complex were in side tunnels, at right angles to the main tunnel. As we got off the bus, we came face to face with the entrance, complete with a gigantic steel blast door three feet thick. It even had the wheel on the inside that extends the big steel bolts when it closes. The chaplain said it weighed about four tonnes. It looked heavier. There's an alarm that goes off when it opens, so people can get out of the way. I must have been quite a sight pushing my daughter in her little umbrella stroller through that door. On the other side was another cavern, and the entrance to the building.

The building itself is a three-storey steel structure mounted on shock absorbers, that winds through a honeycomb of caves in the rock in a sort of square figure eight. Less ceiling to support that way. Inside, it looks pretty much like an office building, with some extra piping, cabling and steel beams thrown in.

Although hundreds once worked down there, there were only two guys when we visited, an old guy and a young guy who monitor the machinery. Kind of reminded me of the Maytag commercials with Gordon Jump and his protege.

Among the cooler things we saw was the power cavern. This is essentially a big cavern outside the main building, that houses the diesel generators (enough to run the entire base, above and below), fuel supply, cooling system, water supply, ventilation controls and all kinds of other good stuff. It's all pipes and cables and panels and machinery, with the catwalks and the rolling cranes. Really awesome to see.

We also got to see the room where they monitor radar feeds from across the country. It's a big room full of consoles similar to what air traffic controllers use. We looked at a map of western Canada, just crawling with little dots that gradually moved. A separate screen could display transponder information for any selected plane. We were filled in on the procedure of identifying, contacting and if necessary, guiding fighters to a radar contact. There was a funny story about a guy with a whale-watching charter business on the east coast who has had fighters scrambled on his plane four times this year. They can't send him the bill, because he's not doing anything illegal.

It was kind of amusing that in this relic of the Cold War, so forbidden to the public, there was my little daughter, happily toddling around examining the equipment. I can't wait until she's old enough to watch movies like War Games, so I can tell her that she's actually been to an underground NORAD base. How many one-year-old girls have done that? Who, of her generation will ever have the chance? I kind of felt like a kid myself, walking around with a look of wonder on my face.

Sadly, we didn't see the command post, with the computer stations, phones and big screens. It's already been cleared out.

In a way, it kind of made me sad that these engineering marvels have become obsolete. Kind of like Saturn 5 rockets. Not practical anymore, but they were something kids of our generation marvelled at. Even if it's because nuclear war is no longer the looming threat it once seemed to be (a very good thing), I can't help but feel I've lost another piece of my childhood. The world is a different place than it was when North American airspace was monitored from huge manmade caverns.

In any case, I was glad to have been able to see this one while I had the chance. It was like stepping into one of those old movies.