Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Blog

Tour North Dakota: Oscar Zero missile alert facility.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

This applies to that.

I haven't been to see this facility, but I very much plan on it. I want to get a sense of what our facility used to be like.

I have been in one of these facilities while they were in operation -- maybe around age 12? Landowners who had part of this system on their land were invited to tour the sites, and my mom and I sent in our reservation a few months ahead of the tour as requested. On the big day, we climbed onto a dark blue Air Force school bus with a bunch of other farmers, and traveled to a site. It wasn't our site, but it was incredibly interesting. I still have impressions of it, vaguely, in my mind.

I hope they are able to preserve this site, but if not...I definitely want to see it before it closes down.

Labels: military, tour north dakota

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Re-Run: Nixon's pyramid.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 2 comments link this post

::This post is a re-run from July 27, 2005. I am running it again because it relates to the previous post on the launch control facility on our land. The post was based not on any semblence of military knowledge, but what I know from living in the area. Feel free to leave corrections or additional information in the comments section.::

In the city park of Langdon, North Dakota, just a few miles down the road from the sleepy town of Nekoma, sits a sharp-edged painted missile. Flowers are planted at its base, and not too far from this armament are the swingsets and slides for small children, with the city pool a few hundred feet down the way. Both the elementary and high schools are located nearby.

Few people probably even think about what is jutting out of the ground at the center of town, proudly displayed and frequently receiving fresh coats of white and black paint. I'm not sure it really crosses anyone's mind that the centerpiece of the park is a weapon of mass destruction.

Not what you'd usually find by a swing set, generally speaking.

This isn't North Korea, but North Dakota, a state that has a past love/hate affair with nuclear missiles. In fact, in the early 1970's, the old line people used to joke about was very nearly true: if we were to become our own country, we'd be one of the top nuclear powers in the world.

The two Air Force bases, both Minot and Grand Forks, played a huge role in the manned and unmanned Minuteman missile system spread out across the state, creating the incongruous picture of idyllic farmsteads, pasture land and farmers plowing around nuclear sites a few hundred feet below the burgeoning wheat. The bread basket of the world was also to be the shield of the United States.

Now only the Minot system is functioning, with the Grand Forks system dismantled and the underground missile silos imploded, though still surrounded by chain link fencing, in the 1990's.

The manned missile site a few miles south on my father's land, with its bunks and kitchens and basketball games out on the concrete late into the evening made possible from the huge, bright lights surrounding the fenced compound, is abandoned, part of the Grand Forks system.

The buildings surely are falling apart inside, but I, because my father was a landowner with such a site on his property, remember being allowed to tour an identical site and know how very comfortable they once were. The blue cloth sofas and chairs, the sparse but clean bunk rooms, the large and friendly communal kitchen. The seemingly wasted expense to build and then implode such an expensive and far-reaching state-wide system can no better be seen than at Nekoma, North Dakota.

During Nekoma's Centennial this year, the public was allowed into the fenced perimeter of the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, and given a chance to see up-close the chopped-off "pyramid" and its surroundings. We were allowed to walk up to the pyramid, around the pyramid, and listen to our guides tell us about the history and the capabilities of the site.

Though not as large as its still very much functioning counterpart at the Cavalier Air Station, whose pyramid is monstrous with a radar so sensitive in cataloguing space debris that it once overloaded Cheyenne Mountain, Nekoma's pyramid rises from the plains like a prairie iceberg. Most of it's cyclopic structure is buried below ground, leaving only the tip to poke through and be seen. According to our tour guide, one of the few men still taking care of the abandoned site, the interior of the structure has been stripped bare, but is so huge and cavernous that many of the hallways and passages deep inside have their own atmosphere. He told of how, on certain days, some hallways have fog rolling about inside. There is also much water, particularly since the water table in the region has been high since about 1993.

Just to the north of the radar pyramid are bunkers and a flat area of weedy concrete with two types of white hatches. Housed here were the Sprint and Spartan missiles. These missiles functioned as interceptors, one long-range (Spartan) and the other in case the Spartan failed.

Our guide pointed out the bunker system which allowed personnel to basically exist below ground should a situation arise.

The huge concrete towers to the south are the remains of exhaust stacks from a massive power plant capable of making the entire site self-sufficient and then some. There was a cooling resevoir deep underground, if I understood correctly, visible as a large hill with a concrete slab on top.

To the the west, of course, was the community. Barracks, a community center with a theater and stores, a church...it was all there. In fact, nearly everything was built and functional, except the planned officer's quarters, before politics, protests and the powers that be pulled the plug.

Our guide talked of how most people in the United States wouldn't sit quietly and let nuclear missiles be buried in their back yard, but North Dakotans would. It's true that I never thought of it, growing up. It was always an understanding that there were missile sites all around me. But it isn't true that there were no protests. On May 15, 1970, International ABM Day, some people let it be known that the Nekoma site wasn't welcome.

But was it truly not welcome?

The people in the towns of both Nekoma, and especially Langdon, still talk about the glory days of the missile site. You can hear it during meetings, when someone will carelessly refer to a past event with the tag "that was back when the missiles came."

I still hear of how nice the county road became when a Minuteman went in along it. Good roads are gold here, and to some, if it brought about good roads, there wasn't much to complain about.

The population influx caused school numbers to jump and changed the region, bringing in new people, new jobs and new opportunities.

People still talk about the military, or some group, coming back to the abandoned Nekoma site and what that would mean for the region as if it were to really happen despite most of the housing having gone down the road to be used for homeless and on reservations. And despite the fact the military is more interested in downsizing rather than upsizing. Despite the fact that the large Grand Forks Air Force Base is going to take a hit from the latest round of base closings.

If only, people think, as they drive by and see a ghost town with a huge pyramid rising from it.

I admit, though, that I miss the bright lights of the missile site on my father's land.

I remember the first night I drove down the road towards home, and suddenly realized the lights were off, and off for good. The night sky was black and there was no eery glow to help remind me where my township road turn was.

I had to relearn the horizon without those lights being there. They'd been there my entire life. Now I, along with many other people here including my father, wonder what the plans for the buildings on this much smaller site are, and if we'll get a crack at them since it was on our land. I know of more than a few farmers who have inquired about the metal quonset-like structure. The realization is, unfortunately, that by the time the military gets around to the issue, the buildings will be fit for the bulldozer and not much else. They've been empty for about ten years.

But I still miss the lights. Texas has their Friday Night Lights and football. We had our nuclear missiles.

Nostalgia. It can even make you miss nukes.

Read more about the Nekoma site:
Global Security
Safeguard Missile Site Radar Facility
See satellite images of the site
ABM Facilities (good shot of full complex here)

Labels: military, re-run

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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