Secret Cold War bunker vacant in Chatham

FEARRINGTON VILLAGE -- For 45 years, it has generated speculation and wild rumors of missile silos, UFOs and odd columns of smoke.

Now one of the nation's most secret Cold War installations -- a giant underground bunker built into a hilltop now flanked by some of fast-growing northern Chatham County's most genteel subdivisions -- has apparently closed.

The department-store-size bunker was built and buried in the early and mid-1960s. From its massive steel and concrete blast doors down to its spring-mounted urinals, the AT&T facility was designed to survive a nearby nuclear explosion.

Neighbors of the site said traffic to and from it had slowed to a trickle in recent months and stopped altogether last week after a stream of trucks hauled away sensitive equipment. The owner of a Pittsboro trucking company said he hauled out what was apparently the last load about two weeks ago and took some of the equipment to other AT&T sites.

At the end of privately owned Big Hole Road, named for the huge pit dug in the early 1960s, is the heavily secured entrance to what county tax records show as 194 acres of AT&T property. The hydraulically deployed steel roadblock is still up, and closed-circuit television cameras still aim at the approach. But the traffic light over the barrier is dead, and an intercom system and phone to contact those inside have been disconnected. No one mans the guard booth, and a security team that once quickly emerged to chase off gawkers has vanished.

Mum's the word

Locals who worked inside couldn't talk then, and still can't.

"I can't talk about nothing," said Charles DeVinney, a former Pittsboro, who worked at the bunker.

Did he sign an agreement not to talk?

"I can't tell you nothing."

An AT&T spokeswoman also declined to discuss the site.

"For security purposes we can't comment in relation to your inquiry," said Della Bowling.

But former Superior Court judge Wade Barber helped build the installation when he was in college and didn't sign any oath of silence. Turns out that even the toilets in the bunker were protected from atomic bombs: They were mounted on springs and fitted with rubber plumbing, Barber said.

Even Barber, though, didn't know why he and other workers were building the underground bunker or the two weird concrete cubes that are just about the only part of the complex above ground.

The cubes, each about 40 feet square, are a clue to the reason the bunker was built, said an expert on U.S. Cold War infrastructure.

5 'Project Offices'

Although AT&T had dozens of similar communications bunkers across the country, the one in Chatham was part of a heavily armored and heavily guarded group of just five that went by the deceptively bland name of "Project Offices," said Albert LaFrance, who runs two Web sites dedicated to Cold War infrastructure.

Unlike the more common AT&T communications bunkers, LaFrance said, the Project Offices were apparently designed to shelter high-level government and military officials as part of a plan to preserve at least a skeletal national government in the event of a nuclear attack. These "Continuance of Government" facilities would need communications capability, but communication wasn't their main mission, he said.

The communications gear would have to survive nuclear blasts, too, which is where the monolithic concrete cubes come in. Each has one side angled gently inward with a shallow, 30-foot dish molded into that side. The dishes, LaFrance said, were the antennas for an expensive, robust communications system known as troposcatter, and the concrete was to protect it from blasts.