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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.
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...
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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?
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)
A tour through an abandoned missile base: Abandoned missile base
How to make a sig
without having an idea
(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'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