Echo-0: "Chains of Command" launch control facility.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger      9 comments      link this post     



::I've linked to photos throughout this post. Please click on the links to see them.::

We grew up with Echo-0 (E-0) a few miles down the road, a launch control facility in the Grand Forks AFB Minuteman Missile Site system. Sometimes my sister Janet and I would travel the few miles by horse and watch the guys play basketball outside in the late summer evening, sticking to the ditch a safe distance from the chain-link fence. My sister Jacqui, when she lived at my grandfather's farmstead a mile away, had a dog that used to love the attention the airmen lavished on her when she would sneak under the fence. One day, she came home with a note attached to her collar, asking her name. She eventually left, by permission, with one of the airmen who had grown attached to her. Dad used to say that if he came too close to the perimeter while doing field work, they would "take notice." Traveling at night down the lonely, dark highway towards home, the bright perimeter lights that towered over the site would let us know that our corner was coming up. My mother and I had once been taken on a tour of a similar missile launch site, back when they were still operating. Landowners on which these sites were situated were sent invitations. The tour was eye-opening for me.

E-0 has been closed and abandoned for over a decade, now, that Air Force facility that sat on a chunk of land in our field. My parents were finally, after ten years, given the chance to buy back the land that had once been my grandfather's and now we are the owners of a paved road that leads to a gravel main road with a helipad off to the side as you near the gate of a completely abandoned building. Ten years, it's been sitting there, home for little else than raccoons and mice.

Today dad took me inside.

The building is sound and, considering that it was unheated for over ten years through North Dakota winters, it is in amazingly good structural shape. The inside, however, has been trashed by raccoons and the other hideous beasts - trespassers - who have demolished much. The evidence of the raccoon destruction was obvious, both by sight and smell. In room 119, a dead raccoon lay rotting on the floor. Ceiling tiles and insulation were stripped, shredded and on the floor.

It was the evidence of what humans did, though, that made me most angry. The fence had a hole cut into it, a hole which the raccoons clearly made later use of as the grass was worn in a neat path from the ditch to the building. Someone had emptied the fire extinguisher all over the kitchen counter and, judging by how raccoon scat had been covered by the now-white powder, it wasn't done when the building was boarded up and abandoned. Windows were smashed out in places inside. There was evidence of scavenging for things - fixtures or whatever else was of value. Pop bottles and empty boxes of Polaroid film littered the floor in some places, bottles and boxes that were nowhere near a decade old.

Yet there were a lot of things left that gave evidence to how fascinating the building was.

There was the remains of a small built-in phone booth, the remnants of an era where making a personal call home required a land line instead of a cell phone. There were the many bunk rooms, the laundry drop chute that led to the laundry room, the meeting rooms and recreational rooms. In one section, behind a heavy, carpeted door, was the probable entrance to something underground, long since cemented over. The entrance to this echoing and dark room had a decal that said "Space Command." There were service tags strewn about on the floor with the signatures of different staff sergeants who had handled the servicing of various bits of equipment. The bathrooms and kitchen, faint shadows of what they once were, had marvelous tiling on the floor and walls, in surprisingly good shape for not having been heated in years. In one room, we found keys splayed all over the floor, and we took them all home; rusted keys, brass keys. A storage closet was stripped bare but the outline of tools that showed where things were to be returned, hung back on the wall, was a reminder of the people that had passed through the facility, a reminder of a different time. Each of the sleeping rooms had an intercom system by the door and a red light that would no doubt flash a warning if the time came. Other rooms in the building had this as well. The kitchen and dining area were evidence of a most convenient setup.

It was an eerie experience, walking through the disasterous mess that still didn't hide the evidence of a system dismantled in the name of peace. Today was windy, like all North Dakota days, the wind blowing in hard and cold from the west, whistling through the ventilation system in the kitchen. The darkened interior, only lit by my dad's flashlight and the periodic flash of my camera, mixed with the windy wail.

"It's kind of ghostly in here," dad said. I agreed. I'd been thinking that myself, feeling as if I was walking through some cold war graveyard being overrun by the animals who were already busy reclaiming an area of the country where the people were few and the space was great. I felt as if I was on the set of a horror or disaster movie. It wasn't The Day After. It was The Decade After.

"We could plant a garden in there," dad said as we drove down the short, paved road to the main gravel road, the chain link fence of E-0 solving the problem of keeping the deer from eating everything. I had been thinking of how a person could plant trees inside the fence, not worrying about deer eating them to a nub. I thought of how, at many missile sites back when the controversial project was going into effect, an evergreen tree had been planted. It was done as a protest, in the name of peace.

I wonder what those protestors would say if they knew of our wishful plans, ideas of trees inside the high barbed-wire laced fence? I'm glad there was no need to use the missile system, but I can't say I didn't feel a little sad when walking through the building. It was walking through yet another abandoned building, another abandoned project, and there's too much of that up here.

Note: If you're interested in seeing what a similar site would have looked like in its heyday, there is a preserved site near Cooperstown, North Dakota. If you're curious about the history of these silos, you might want to check out SiloWorld. This web page, by Jim Kirkpatrick, also has a lot of good links on the subject. You can also read my re-run post about the pyramid near Nekoma, North Dakota, which is connected to this topic. You can learn more about the minuteman, and see photos of what the building once looked like, here.

Additional photos: My brother-in-law located some photos on Jim Kirkpatrick's site that you might find interesting. This photo sure looks like E-0. This photo shows some kind of control room or something. This diagram shows the layout of these kinds of facilities. And this diagram shows the floorplan.

Labels: military

Copyright (c) Julie R. Neidlinger  11/22/2006 03:48:00 PM   (9) comments   Links to this post    

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