The Diefenbunker is now a not-so-clandestine relic of our Cold War past. But there’s another bunker carved into the rock of Lanark County. Andrew King tells its story.
The Diefenbunker, once a top-secret military installation in Carp, is now a museum with thousands of curious visitors passing through its solid steel blast doors.
The story behind the Diefenbunker is now widely known — during the Cold War, in response to the growing Communist threat of an intercontinental nuclear missile attack, this four-story underground Emergency Government Headquarters was commissioned in 1958 by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to protect key government officials in the event of a nuclear attack. But there’s another Cold War bunker in the Ottawa area, abandoned because it flooded during construction.
The workers who built the Diefenbunker laboured under a cloak of secrecy. This 100,000 square foot underground bunker was built in the quiet village of Carp by Defence Construction Canada in about two years. Extensive research and design work by the National Research Council and the Defence Research Board made sure the facility could withstand a five megaton nuclear blast within a two-kilometre range. Many construction workers were unsure of what they were building and sworn to secrecy in the interest of national security. Still, the bunker used over 32,000 tonnes of concrete with walls five feet thick. The ambitious facility, built under the code name “Project EASE” was completed in 1961 and was fully operational until it was decommissioned in 1994. The project was overseen by Colonel Edward Churchill, who would later become Director of Installations for Expo 67.
Project EASE was so secret that it is not commonly known the Carp Diefenbunker is not the original bunker site, but a backup after a first bunker was compromised. This original bunker was excavated at a remote location in the solid rock of Lanark County in what is now Mississippi Mills before it was abandoned in favour of the Carp site.
Little is known about the original bunker. Construction began a year before the start of the Carp project. An Internet search provided information that the location was abandoned after groundwater flooded the operation 10 kilometres west of Almonte. Using co-ordinates and a radius projection mapped on satellite images, we studied the area for the possible remains of a flooded abandoned bunker site. Noting that the dimensions of the completed Carp bunker are 160 feet by 160 feet, an oddly square shape of those same dimensions was found near Pakenham. The dimensions of the Diefenbunker were overlaid on the shape. It was an exact match.
Located deep within the rugged terrain of Lanark County, this seemed like a logical place for a nuclear bomb-proof bunker. Using the natural protection of the solid igneous rock of the Canadian Shield, this site would also be remote enough to be away from prying eyes and allow construction to proceed in secrecy.
After traversing bug-filled swamps, cliffs and woods of the target area, we came across what looked to be the original bunker site. Carved out of solid rock, a flooded hole four storeys deep lay before us in the woods. A long-abandoned overgrown construction road was probably used to access this secret site in 1958. Many telltale signs of construction still remain — huge piles of crushed, blasted rock lie in piles surrounding the pit that would later be used as back-fill to cover the four-storey concrete bunker box and help to absorb a nuclear blast. Standing at this rugged location, it’s easy to imagine the sights and sounds of a large scale secret military operation underway in this remote wilderness during the height of the Cold War.
Unfortunately, after construction hit groundwater, the site flooded, submerging the lost bunker. With the site now compromised, a secondary site had to be found. That was in Carp, where the new bunker was built and remained in operation until 1994.
The original 1958 site remains a hidden relic of our Cold War past left to succumb to nature and the surroundings from which it was created.