Dranesville AT&T bunker
My friend Craig forwarded me a link to a wonderful collection of information on AT&T’s old “long lines” infrastructure. It made me realize I’ve never told this story.
I’d seen this particular website before. I think a Slashdot story on AT&T putting up the old microwave towers for sale prompted me to do some Google searches, after which I spent a lot of time looking through this stuff.
I’ve found this map particularly interesting. I used to live in Northern Virginia near to the non-incorporated area known as Dranesville. You can see many of these routes converging at Dranesville. At the time I was intimately familiar with the phone phreaking technologies, possibly the only thing that Apple-cofounder Steve Wozniak and I have in common. Figuring out how the phone system worked was a fun challenge.
The neighborhood we lived in during the mid-1980s had big houses on large grassy lots. It was built in a former grazing field. It looked like most any subdivision except for the small building on the hill near the entrance. You know, the one with the helicopter pad!
The building in question is in the center of this Google Map, and my former home is marked with the A. This is the AT&T bunker that those Dranesville cables come through. If you look closely at the satellite photos you can see a number of circular air vents on the western side of the building. These went very deep into the ground and exchanged air between the surface and the bunker. There is an elevator in the building which leads down. I’m not sure how far down it all goes.
Needless to say for a teenage geek, having a bunker in the neighborhood was pretty damn exciting! It was a small brick building on a small grassy but well-maintained hill. There was a simple, small AT&T sign at the end of the driveway and that was it. It wasn’t even fenced. Cows grazed in the field behind it.
A guy about my age lived right next door to us. I remember his mom worked at the facility. I’m not sure what she did there and I don’t think she ever got into too much detail. It stayed a mystery for years, though. Back in those days (pre-Internet) I had no real way of knowing what it was or why it was there. Only through the magic of the Internet did I finally figure out its importance.
As you know, during the Cold War nuclear war was a real possibility. Around Kennedy’s time, I believe, the U.S. government realized the need to have redundant communications infrastructure. The Feds knew that a bomb dropped on Washington would wipe out the telecommunications serving D.C. Thus, the answer was to run redundant lines to the periphery of the city where they might survive a nuclear blast. The podunk spot on the map that Dranesville was certainly didn’t need that scale of communications!
Soon the bunkers became obsolete: first by the devastating improvements made to nuclear weapons, then by the growth of fiber optics.There was no longer a need for a helicopter pad at my neighborhood bunker, though the bunker is still apparently used by AT&T.
I hope one day that I can get a tour of this place. If it ever gets put on the block like many of AT&T’s other bunkers I would love to bid on it. I would build a stately home on top of it and erase all visible vestiges of its former use. The only clue to anything unusual would be the long elevator ride between floors!