Roadside Mysteries

or maybe ВОЙНЫ И МИРА

The Entry Way

Between the towns of Greeley and Windsor is hidden this relic of the cold war.  It’s an underground ICBM site that used to hold an atomic weapon!

The 549th

As reported before, the 566th out of Warren AFB was one of the squadrons in charge, but apparently the 549th had some control as well since their patch is painted on the inside wall of the entry way.

The Atlas E

Here’s the truck with the Atlas E going down the street. They would carefully back the truck into the entry way to load the silo.  If the command came it would be ready to launch in fifteen minutes.

A Safe Place

The place was well protected and could be used as a fallout shelter! I wonder how many citizens in Greeley or Windsor actually knew it existed?  I can remember doing evacuation drills in grade school.  We were supposed to go home. To what? Our own fallout shelters?

Fun for the whole family

For a few hours at least. Then what?

Mr. Ambrose

Pete Ambrose is the manager of the area site. He lives in a house built on the grounds and manages the area camp site and gives free tours of the facility. Here he is showing off a personal radiation detector.  Pete told us that the farmland just east of the missile site used to be a WWII German POW camp!

Crackers!

Pete and his friends have a collection of cold war items to view. Since there is no real rocket in the gantry or liquid oxygen to play with (You can pick it up with a magnet!) you have things like medical tools and condensed food and this can of crackers. The large box says: CRACKER, SURVIVAL, ALL PURPOSE (CIVIL DEFENSE). They were made by the Sunshine biscuit Company in Elmhurst, Illinois – Near the Keebler Company. There’s a joke in there somewhere!

The Tunnel

There is a tunnel. It’s not very long, but there had to be a way for the missile personnel to get away from the rocket when it fired and still be underground and have control of the rocket.

Control Room

The equipment looks like an early Burroughs Corporation computer and a few analog relay racks with a strip-chart recorder.  Note that there was lots of reading material on the left wall.

Some years ago it was revealed that this site used solvents to clean fuel tanks and allowed residual rocket fuel and solvents to flow into the floor drain! Didn’t I say before that this is about a mile away from a water treatment plant near the Poudre river?  There is some remediation underway with a proposed plan available for public comment in January 2011. Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.