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Infiltration
Elvis Maximus writes "Today's Salon has a piece by Janelle Brown on "infiltration," the practice of intruding in campus steam tunnels, abandoned mental hospitals and the like." Some fascinating links here, especially for New York City.
One other interesting tidbit. (Warning, this is hearsay, and may even be a local urban legend.) Ronald Reagan came to our university to speak. Supposedly some hours before the speach, some students were caught in the tunnels. They ended up spending the day sitting in their rooms in the company of a humorless secret service agent. I guess the feds have gotten a bit more thorough since the grassy knoll.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Should have expected that from Salon.
:)
My brother, a *great* (if I say so myself) building hacker from MIT back in the 80's woudl probably be offended at the "gateway drug" refernce. (He ran and led the MIT off-limit undergread tour for many years.)
He's a scrupulously honest person who wouldn't trespass on places he didn't have a close familial relationship with.
Which is a good thing since building hacking , as theyc all it at MIT, did get him inetrested in security to the point now where as a hobby he's a professionally trained security expert and knwos hiw way around most locks and security systems
I grew up within walking distance of an abandoned VA hospital in Augusta, Georgia. In middle school and early in high school, we would go up there and wander through the halls and rooms, looking at abandoned equipment and poking through old filing cabinets. The cool part was that behind the main building--a hotel that had been converted during WWII to support a nearby air base--there was a warren of interconnected buildings with low rooftops between them to run up and down.
There was a security guard who seldom left his post, but as long as you were quiet, you could have a great time. The guard kept ruffians out, and vandals, but us sneaky geeks could have a great time.
One spring we took turns setting up MUDlike puzzles for each other. You dropped clues on floors in various rooms leading to a secret prize somewhere. The prize was a Smurf doll I had appropriated from my younger sister. I'd go to school and the winner would show me the doll, then it was his turn to hide it.
When they demolished the hospital in the mid-1980s, I was left with some great memories. By that time the building had starting to get creepy--scattered beer cans and used condoms littered certain rooms, and the place lost its innocent mystery. But my sister and brother and I would ride horses around on the enormous front lawn on fragrant evenings, ducking the branches of tall magnolias.
But vadding is a hell of a lot of fun. Once you start looking at a building as a machine, you'll want to start poking around to see how it works. The basements and rooftops of the 42-story skyscraper near Underground Atlanta kept me and my colleagues amused on slow workdays in the mid-1990s.
Happiness is an unlocked maintenance door.
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This is not my sandwich.
This kind of reminds me Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. It's a book that describes a man who unwittingly becomes part of a seperate society that lives in the sewers and on the rooftops. This soceity is invisible to the common people and is ruled by rats. Highly reccommended, especially if you practice infiltration / vadding yourself.
Haven't read the Salon article yet, but there are three things to be careful of in abandoned buidings: cops, homeless people, and criminals. You're trespassing, and if there are "no trespassing" signs posted, you can probably be arrested for criminal trespass. As for the homeless, most of them are harmless, but lots of them are mentally ill, and if you suddenly invade a schizophrenic paranoid's home, or stumble onto a meth lab or crack den, or even some boozing surlies, you could be in some very real physical danger.
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This is not my sandwich.
Of course, we at nearby Harvey Mudd already have switched 100BaseT in the dorms, so such projects are unecessary. =P
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
We included the outdoors tho', too. I remember some storm drain activities and such. Good, dangerous, idiotic fun!
**>>BELCH
Somewhere in the article, read "Infiltration is in no way a new concept -- after all, who hasn't clambered through an abandoned building, ducked under a fence to explore or slipped behind a barrier to see what's there?" ;-) Wonder that tendency also contributed its bit to the ideas propogating into horror movies!
Really?
In the steam tunnels, live steam! Ever see steam pouring out of a vent? It did because a 60 year old pipe burst. Confined space + Live steam + you = severe burns.
In basements, live step down transformers, air compressors, steam lines, hot and cold water, and other goodies. I have seen bare 1,000 volt buss bars behind a door that was rusted open. Oh yeah, I needed a flashlight to see it because the bulb was burnt out. Cool huh? Warning sign covered up by the door, no lights, only a hum to let you know you are about to die (made me turn around).
Whatever you do, please stay away from buildings that have those cute little radiation signs on them. Yes, there are places that you can get yourself hurt. Where I worked, the baddies were protected by two locked doors, and trenches built into the floor so that you could walk around. It was also one of the first targets the nuts thought of! The radiation protection people do their best to keep you out and warn you, but some figured that you get what you deserve if you break in.
As for people eating in places like this, well Ewwwwww!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As a Caltech student, I can definitely affirm the accounts of the great steam tunnel tradition. The house most famous for this sort of thing is Blacker.
One fine day, we decieded we needed a faster intranet between the north and south houses for the trading of DivX, porn, and such [shared 10BaseT just does not cut it anymore]. So, the most obvious solution was to set up some routers (FreeBSD and Linux) and drop some gigabit cable. (we only had 100BaseT NICs, but we got a good deal on the cat 5e)
Of course, it was wonderful to have relatively easy access to the tunnels, enabling us to run the cable quickly, neatly, and safely.
Here's some wonderful pictures of the whole thing. The tunnels became quite constricted in some areas, so we had to protect our buddy from the elements (asbestos, spiders, god knows what) as he crawled in the dirt underneath the students houses.
Preparing...
Ready to go..
Anticipation
Success!!
Resist the temptation to go down telco manholes tho. A friend of mine went down one 5 years ago(while I was on lookout), and didn't realize all the gases and such down there. Fortunately, he didn't die, or get injured for that matter.
Maybe I missed it but I can't believe no one from Columbia has posted.
Website for tunnel maps for many university campuses with maps and lots of info on Columbia.
Columbia at one point had the third largest building tunnel system in the world, behind MIT and the Kremlin. It is famous for many things including the beginning of the Manhattan Project.
This 7M pdf also contains a good article on the history of Columbia's tunnels.
Tunnels are a major part of geek life at Columbia and tunneling has been incorporated into the traditions of many campus organizations. CUMB (Columbia University Marching Band) gives an underground tour at the beginning of every school year.
I seem to recall that here in the UK property owners are required by law to secure dangerous structures to prevent children from breaking in and injuring themselves.
Every year there is a news story about some scouts going into an abandoned mine and never coming out again. Sometimes the bodies are never found. Some of the dangers are here.
Falling down a several story vertical shaft can be a real drag.
I don't mean to be a spoil sport, but the skill in vadding/infiltration is not getting access, but not putting yourself in a situation you can't get out of.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Wow, this sounds really cool. Since we've pretty much explored the earth, it seems like there's nowhere "new" to go, nothing new to discover. Adventure has sort of died. I think that's why we see people getting all excited about going out into space, or climbing mountains, or participating in extreme sports. There just isn't much that hasn't already been done. Nobody will ever open Tuts tomb for the first time, or scale Everest for the first time, or find an isolated culture in some remote mountain range. But this "infiltration" seems like a revival of exploration, adventure and discovery...but instead, you aren't exploring new things, you're exploring, old, forgotten things, relics from the past. All of a sudden history is not just something you read about in a book, or watch on TV. It's real, it's here, you've discovered it, your touching and seeing things that people in past lives created or worked with. Really cool stuff. I wonder if there is a group around where I live.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Rich
The tc.umn.edu steam plant was still active at least back in the mid-90s when I was there - it just seemed abandoned. Despite the notorious tunnel security and the legends surrounding it, the steam plant (schmutzfabrik, people called it) was almost notoriously unguarded, so much so that it was a favorite high school drinking location. Later, it was just a convenient shortcut to cut from campus over to the St. Anthony Main area. Just don't go down to the parking lot on the river flat, because it seems to be where the U cops like to idle their engines and eat donuts.
(The U tunnels on the other hand, were always a mystery - with stories of people getting busted for even standing around storm drain pipes, or going through a door in the student union and ending up on the other side of campus or down by the river. Some of these stories might be real -- go to the U engineering library and look at some of the utopian underground societies the civil engineering department was dreaming up in the 1970s.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually you can. When water reaches 100C it needs an additional kick of about 4kJ/g to break intermolecular bonds and convert it to vapor. Actually whats really cool is when you get to the triple point of an element. You get solid, liquid, and gaseous phases in equilibrium so the compound is simultaneously boiling, condensing, sublimating, depositing, and crystallizing. It's a bit hard to get this with water but if you put dry ice in a closed container, you can observe this.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
a very bright young lad who now works at RIM seemed to enjoy the service tunnels that run throughout campus. There's still many stories of them, and this page sums it up nicely. Oh, and dig around his site and learn how to make a nice digital camera from a flatbed scanner!
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
A few years back, a friend and I were "infiltrating" an abandoned Nike missile site located in the upper Florida Keys. On the way out of the wooded area we had the misfortune of being stopped (at gunpoint) by a US Customs officer. There's nothing like the adrenaline rush one experiences when you come around the corner and see some guy in shorts (no badge or other identifying clothing) aiming a 9mm at you and yelling at you to get down on the ground (without identifying himself as being associated with law enforcement). Apparently the old roads in that area are used by drug traffickers to move into vehicles shipments that are dropped via plane into the ocean and we were now a suspected drug trafficker for being in that area. We spent the first hour laying face down in the middle of the road in the humid, blazing heat as the lone officer awaited backup. We spent the next two hours sitting handcuffed on the ground as the various local authorities tried to figure out who exactly held jurisdiction over the area we had trespassed in. One by one they came over the two hour period: the Sheriff's office, the Florida Marine Patrol, the Parks Department. By the end of the 3-4 hour roasting there were about eight officers from every imagineable government agency. They decided that the parks department had jurisdiction and we were charged with trespassing on park property and assigned a court date.
Prior to the court date the parks department discovered that the location we were sighted and arrested at, which was about 20 feet from the side of a state road, was not in fact "park property" (and was instead a DOT right-of-way) and the charges were dropped.
badtz-maru
During my first year on campus, I heard rumours that there existed old steam tunnels that connected all the buildings on campus. Of course, my partner in crime, and myself felt it obligatory to locate these tunnels, and utilize them for our own crafty wants. Upon finding grates on the ground that billowed warmth, and often light, we found our entrance.
On various post-bar drunken wanders, we managed to get in via a metal door on the ground that we were able to jimmy the latch on the inside with the help of a strong skinny stick. Once we were in, good gravity, was it ever a good find. We could get into virtually any building on campus at any time of day or night. We could hook up cable to any residence room, and we could wreck havoc onto the digital phone system that the University used.
They go on forever, narrowing to the point that you walk single file, and duck way down, and opening up into cavernous rooms that echo when you talk. Some of the tight squeezes were reminisant of spalunking into a cave except that this was all man made.
One method of getting into the tunnels that we found was to get into a maintanance closet that has a tricky door that can be opened with a good old fashion flying shoulder. Then we would shimmy down a hot water pipe (not much fun) then crab walk on our back along a 1.5"x1.5" tunnel for about 100 meters.
We found that maintanance workers had porn on the walls, and that others had broken into the tunnels as far back as the 60's and left their mark with spray paint.
To those in new buildings, or campus' explore them late at night, and checkout anything that looks like a maintanace access, because often they can be lots of fun, and can allow for trickery, and copeious amounts of hellish behaviour. I think in Guelph Ontario though, the punishment on campus for being caught in the steam tunnels is expulsion. So its all about keeping the escape posibilities in mind all the time.
Maybe I'm a bit on the paranoid side. I've seen water treatment plants detonate from sparks, and entire towns literally moved due to dangerous conditions.
I'm sure it's in the FAQs, but I'm equally sure that somebody will have trivialised it in their minds. If you =are= going to make a hobby out of going into abandoned buildings, long-forgotten tunnels, etc, at least try to find out WHY they were left.
Most, probably because they weren't needed. A few, because the building had become unsafe. (And remember that they won't have become any safer, through being neglected.) Of those few, some may have dangerous chemicals. Asbestos was, once, a popular material. And many fashionable paints and glazes from the 1700's and 1800's are now considered highly toxic and/or carcinogens.
That leaves those rare one or two places where, for some freaky reason, there has been a methane build-up in some air-tight corridor or pipe. Or something just as nasty. There are plenty of naturally-occuring gasses which will be common in a decaying ruin which can guarantee you a very bad hair day. Most have sufficient air-flow that that isn't an issue. But it doesn't hurt to be careful when you come across sealed doors to underground bunkers.
Ok, enough of the doom and gloom. If you're smart and you know what you're doing, it sounds a great activity. There are more ruins than potholes in your average city, giving "common folk" a chance to engage in "alternative spelunking".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I remember back in high school (I went to BHS in Bakersfield, CA). The high school itself is rather old, over 100 years now. It was originally the community college, and a few of the buildings date to this time.
My friend and I never explored the place, as it was way too easy to get caught, and many doors were welded shut, but there were plenty of spaces just begging to be explored. I remember in one building (the oldest, that housed the library and "study" hall), stairs led down past the basement classrooms, and at the end of the stairs were doors that opened outward (!), but had no door handles (!!) - wonder why?
I was told by my chemistry teacher that between that building and the science building (the newest building on the campus, built in the 60's), used to be tunnels that connected the two, and in the middle (aboveground was a very large field) was an irradiation lab - but it had since been filled in.
Other areas were what had to be some kind of tunnel system under the park area between the industrial hall and Warren hall, because there was this large blue capped pipe, surrounded by a small stone wall - it was a vent pipe of some kind. I remember seeing the phone company running cabling in it, so it was some kind of access tunnel. There was also, near the principal's office area, a large concrete cover thing, with a welded trap door on top, and "vents" along the edges. It was only a couple of feet tall, and stair-stepped shaped, of two layers.
Our auditorium was a WPA project - massive concrete work - walls three feet thick in areas. Of course, all over campus were bomb shelter signs, as most of the buildings had basements.
I remember going to a night class, just for the heck of it (not like I needed the grade or anything) - it was woodshop. Our "final" consisted of cleaning up and old storage area, of unfinished projects. Sawdust a foot thick at our feet had to be swept out. Then we got to organize the projects. Old desks, chairs, various other creations... One desk we opened, patterned off an old-time school desk, had a "How to Survive the Bomb" Red Cross pamphlet, from the 50's in it!
Now I live in Phoenix, Arizona - we have an old VA hospital, still in use, at the corner of 7th Street and Indian School Road. One time I was in the area looking for a job, and I wandered in (my GF was working in an adjacent area at the time). I managed to get down to the very basement of the hospital - a steam tunnel like area, very errie, very low light - and very interesting. I was approached by a guard, but made up an excuse, and got out of there. On subsequent days (after job hunts), I tried to get to the mental ward on the third floor, but the elevator kept skipping the floor as a security precaution. I couldn't find the stairs to it...
I am sure there are other areas to explore in the Phoenix area (that aren't abandoned mines - those you want to stay clear of) - I keep thinking the Westward Ho might hold interesting areas, as well as other parts of downtown...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Most large buildings are heated with steam radiators. It is therefore necessary to pipe that steam around so that it can be used. In the case of many college campuses and similar installations there often isn't a furnace in each building but instead a really big central furnace. The steam is then piped around the campus so that it can heat all the buildings. Usually tunnels are built to carry the steam pipes and communication lines and whatever else needs to go between buildings. Often times these tunnels are large enough for a man to walk in so that the pipes and cables can be serviced if necessary or in the case of tunnels built in the 1950's some were built even larger so that we could also use them to hide from the Russian bombers.
You can sometimes tell where the tunnels run in the winter since they will heat the ground above them and melt off the snow. If you went to college in a colder climate you can probably remember that there were a few sidewalks that were always clear of snow, that's probably why.
Many cities also use a similar arrangement for downtown buildings. It's a pretty common practice to pipe steam to downtown from a garbage incenerator. This arrangement pays pretty well for the city since they can charge the garbage haulers to dump trash at the incenerator then they burn the trash to produce steam that they can sell to downtown businesses.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
A tour through an abandoned missile base: Abandoned missile base
How to make a sig
without having an idea
I did this at the U of MN one summer day nearly 20 years ago. There was an access off of an old storm drain on the side of the river embankment.
It was interesting to a 15 year old, but I'm not sure what the interest would be now. I mainly remember it as hot, dirty, dark and extremely frowned upon by the campus police.
The part about the police is what made it less an exploration and more of an evasion -- the tunnels had quite a few motion sensors which in past 'spelunking' expeditions had been set off by others in our party, yielding trespass citations.
We evaded the motion sensors but because they were there and we had no map, we didn't get to 'explore' the system very much. We ended up climbing out of the subbasement of a steam plant and hiding behind a vine-covered fence as the police drove by slowly. The most remarkable thing about the whole experience was the steam plant -- I don't know how we climbed up 3 levels of that place (it was very open, like an old factory in a movie) without someone seeing us -- but it was like the steam plant was totally abandoned.
In toto it was an adventure, but looking back there wasn't much to it -- just a lot of walking around in a hot, dark place worrying about the cops.
Explore the dark silent depths of usenet groups/hierarchies that have fallen into disuse!
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Tweet, tweet.
We all know that infiltration is a "gateway crime." Young kids who partake of such activities will inevitably find themselves drawn to other, more serious, crimes like skateboarding. And crack.
Joe
(From the Jargon file)...
. ht ml
;-)
http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/v/vadding
#include "us hackers did it first.h"
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
I discovered this about 6 months ago. A friend was just wondering around our neighborhood and came across this big brick wall. He came back and told me, so we went over that night to climb over it. On the other side was the Naval Asylum. We live in Philadelphia, by the way.
It was built in the 1820's to house US Naval officers no longer able to care for themselves. It's just been sitting there since 1976, when it was abandoned. The Naval Home (new PC name) is now in Georgia if I'm not mistaken.
Anyway, we've made quite a few visits to this place. The back yard is fantastic. It's extremely overgrown, but in the middle is an almost-defunct gazebo. On either side of the main building are two large houses. One housed the "governor" of the complex, and I forget who the other was for.
The first time we went, we explored the inside of the main building a little - we first walked in through a back entrance into the old cafeteria. We went down a long hallway which traversed the building front-back. It intersected with two looooooong hallways, going side to side through the building. Well, we got to the front of the building and noticed that we were stnading about 10 feet from a collapsed floor. That, and the fact that our only flashlight's batteries weren't working led us to a near panic, but we managed to calmly walk out of the *dark* building until we figuratively pee'd out pants. So, we went home for a lantern and batteries (and a stock of beer - to get sufficiently drunk).
The second visit, later into the same night, led us throughout the building. A few of the interesting things we found are:
o Three small rooms labled "Special Care Room #1", "Special Care Room #2", and "Medication Room"
o A calendar, left hanging on the wall and on the month of November, 1976 (same month the place was abandoned).
o The central room of the building - round with a tall (about 3 stories tall) arched ceiling. Windows from higher floors look out into the room (making the room a bit more scary to be standing in).
o Scattered all over the floor of the central room were "Request for Dismissal" slips, all signed and dated in the 60's and 70's.
We stayed long enough on this visit to sit on the back balcony and watch the sun rise over the Schylkill, Philadelphia's main river.
The overall feeling this place produces is definately eerie. The paint is peeling from the walls and ceilings everywhere. Paint chips cover the tiled floors so it's impossible to walk quietly (for better or worse). There are a few areas (hallway intersections, central room, etc) where it's impossible to see everything at once - especially with only single-beam flashlights. The thought of crazed Naval officers from pre-Civil War through post-Vietnam eras living and dying within the same walls is also a little spooky...
On subsequent visits, we did more exploring of the main building, but we also explored one of the mansions next to it. We didn't go too far into the house, as most of it had already collapsed (ceiling beams, staircases, etc) We did get around the entirety of the first floor and the basement. In the kitchen was the skeleton of a cat, with fur still placed naturally, making it look almost alive...
I had no idea these "infiltration" groups existed. I'm making plans (as of now) to go back and do a photography project at this complex. When that happens, I'll surely create a site and post everthing I've got.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Just watch your back; some underground, outta the way tunnels do have the occasional squatter or so. Don't poke them with sharp sticks or anything.
--M.
In late High School a small group of us explored the Brio site near Houston, TX. It was a new community created by a land developer. Nice houses on the average. Anyway, due to the burying of massive quantities of toxic waste nearby a *lot* of children living there had turned up with leukemia, often fatally.
Consequently the entire neighborhood had been abandoned. However, you could still see the odd lighted window in a house or the flicker of a television in an upstairs window. Bear in mind that there were hundreds of houses in this area - block after block. Most of them were entirely boarded up. It was a decidedly eery experience capped off by our visit to the abandoned elementary school. The overgrown playground alone gave off a terribly post-apocolyptic vibe. There were also abandoned cars littered here and there.
We tried to go back a few months later but by then the police were in force and they sent us home promptly. Still, glad to have seen it.
Infiltration.org is real nice, and they're fine fellows, but sometimes, you have to draw the line. Someone found my Montréal Métro (sorry, just in french, except for this page) website, and kept pestering me for infiltrating it. Not something to do, and for safety, I had to put a disclaimer on my Métro exploration pages (all my explorations were legit - duly accompanied by Métro officials).
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how Katz 'infilitrated' his way into ./ ?
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
i've been a fan of infiltration.org for a while now: that's probably because i live in Toronto, where a lot of the "infiltration" on the site is being done. the pictures of Toronto's Subway Tunnels are amazing (including an abandoned station i never knew about). plus i had no idea how many strange things were hidden in the Royal York Hotel!
i've read most of the articles over in great detail, but i'm still too chickenshit to go down into the Subway tunnels myself. phrases like "allowing just barely enough room for a human to press up against the wall and let a train whip past" don't exactly make the situation any better.
but it's great that some people are doing this and making the pictures and information available to the rest of us on the web! it's definitely a site worth reading.
- j
There's plenty of Victorian era sanitoriums that are currently empty here in the UK. One of the biggest and most interesting was Holloway Sanitorium, which has actually been restored and turned into apartments, but for fifteen years lay rotting. It's a massive structure which was opened in 1885 and closed in the early eighties. It was then used occassionally for film work and music videos (including the Cure's Charlotte Sometimes video).
Then the original owners who had bought the hospital from the NHS went bust. The subsequent owners stripped the slate roof off and let the building decay. They wanted the land the building was on for houses, and thought that if the building decayed to a point where it was unsavable they would get permission to pull it down.
Instead the council sued the f*ck out of them, and a new consortium finally stumped up the cash to restore it. They got permission to build houses on what had been the gardens, as they had run to rack and ruin.
While it was derelict, some friends and I used to regularily break in at night to both the sanitorium and it's church. The enormous tower was full of pigeon crap, but well worth the climb.
Next time you fly into Heathrow, keep an ewe out for an enormous gothic tower near the airport - that'll be the Sanitorium. Many people mistake it for Holloway's other famous building, the university nearby in Egham, but that's nowhere near as impressive.
(Google turns up a few relevant links if anyone's interested).
Chris
The newsgroup has been around since at least 1994. I'm not sure how much traffic it gets these days, but it used to get a fair amount in the days before the web was such a big deal. I can still remember how disappointed we were when after exploring every building on campus , there were no steam tunnels. Ahhh the good ole days. --Silurian