I was having a coffee with my wife at my local coffee establishment, when my cell phone died, necessitating a reach for a nearly week-old analog version of the local small town newspaper.
There, I found a fascinating story, by James Rada, Jr., detailing the hollowing out of a portion of nearby South Mountain in the 1950s, in order to build a massive atom-bomb-proof bunker to house politicians and military personnel should that be needed following a nuclear attack.
The Raven Rock site was chosen because “the mountain was made a very hard green stone granite, the fourth hardest mineral on the planet. At the time it was believed that the underground bunker could withstand a nuclear attack.”
Right. That same Catoctin Greenstone is the hard stuff on which my house sits. It’s a type of meta-basalt, green schist, or prasinite that was laid down about 570 million years ago, making it older than the rings of Saturn or the North Star.
I’ve shifted a bit of this stuff, and it’s as hard as Easter Island hammer stone.
So how much of this stuff was blasted out? Apparently, half a million cubic yards over the space of 10 months. Wow. A big dump truck might hold 15 cubic yards of material. To move half a million cubic yards, you would need over 33,000 dump truck loads.
The hollow part is a half a mile inside the mountain, and a half mile below the peak. Inside is a facility the size of a small town, complete with fire department, police department, medical facilities, bowling alley, and a dining facility serving four meals a day. The buildings inside are as tall as three stories.
Today, the site appears to be a communications facility which houses part of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
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