SECRETS of the UNDERWORLD
By BOB KEEFER
The Register-Guard
WEARING CHEST WADERS and a yellow hard hat, I am winched slowly down a hole in the ground to be surrounded by darkness and the sound of running water.
Above me, Gary Lynnes and Bill Buterbaugh have set up a steel tripod between orange traffic cones over a manhole near the Willamette River bike path at Polk Street on this rainy winter morning. Once the two city maintenance workers hook a cable to my OSHA approved body harness, I grab the tripod legs and step off backward into the void.
As Buterbaugh cranks, I find myself descending into an underworld worthy of Orpheus himself, a dark and dank part of Eugene that few people ever get to see.
Below the manhole, I am suspended in a large, shadowy and slightly haunting gray cavern. As my eyes adjust, I begin to make out strange words and symbols on the walls around me. Tunnel entrances beckon from either direction. One last turn of the winch and I'm standing in water.
If this all sounds Jungian, that's the point.
Eugene is just so above-ground as a city. We're a community without much of an underbelly. We value process and sunshine laws and making it all explicit. But underneath it all, even Eugene has its basements of subconsciousness, those odd backwaters and turbulent eddies where leftover pieces of nightmare mix with ordinary reality.
One day, I picked up the phone and started calling around the various agencies in town that might hold the keys to our deepest underground spaces.
Could I come see them, please?
THE POLK STREET vault, as this man-made cavern is called, was built in the days when storm drains and sewers emptied into a single collection system and then flowed out to the river.
Now, of course, sewage goes into its own "sanitary" system and into a treatment plant, and only the street runoff flows into this vast concrete chasm. As my eyes adjust to the gloom, it begins to look like a demolished parking structure inside, or perhaps an earthquake ruin.
The vault measures about 15 feet tall - roughly the height of two regular rooms - and feels about as large as a two-car garage, perhaps longer. Next to me on the wall are the rusted rungs of an old access ladder that look as if they would snap under a child's weight.
As I reach ground, water wells around my boots about 6 inches deep - a slow, black, Stygian river coming from a 90-inch-diameter pipe upstream from me. A few feet away, a tangle of clear plastic tarp is snagged in midstream.
Around me, every surface is covered with spray-painted graffiti, layered so deep it is impossible to read more than a scrap of vulgarity here or there.
The graffitists are as determined as the cave artists of Europe; their most likely entrance to the vault is hundreds of feet away through the river outflow. Nevertheless, maintenance workers find sleeping bags in here, and even tents.
Buterbaugh, who works more often in the sanitary side of the system, where he is in charge of maintaining remote monitoring equipment, is sometimes afraid of exactly what he might find underground.
"Most of the places we go, you don't really care to see what you're doing anyway," he says. "I don't like rats."
Are there rats down here?
"Some of the places I've gone, uh, yeah."
Any other critters?
"Kevin, he does the storm system, he says now and then they'll run into a nutria. And mud puppies. Like big salamanders. One time I was working and there was a huge concrete ring about that high and I didn't have a head lamp on and it just felt like a person under
there ..."
He shudders.
No alligators?
"I think about that when I'm down there. It's so dark and you're looking down these things. You know, it wasn't so many years ago somebody let a caiman (a small, alligator-like animal) loose over by the Delta Ponds. That was pretty unusual. I think about that sometimes. I try not to. You can't help it when you're down there."
In the vault, I find no strange animals, but when Buterbaugh and Lynnes pass me a flashlight down on the end of a rope, I discover another tunnel entrance, a round opening just downhill and through a large, square doorway, beckoning me to enter.
I walk through the water until my rope harness brings me up short and shine the feeble light as far as it will penetrate.
Above the tunnel, someone has spray-painted a message, in large, red letters.
"Beware Civilization," it says.
THE BIGGEST obstacle to entering Eugene's underworld is bureaucratic. To get into the Polk Street Vault a photographer and I were required to sit through an hour of videos approved by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on "confined space entry." That's a somewhat flexible term for going into any place that's potentially dangerous for a huge spectrum of reasons, from bad air to getting crushed by suddenly moving machinery.
In one video - apparently based on a real-life incident - a black comedy of errors ranging from language barriers to excessive management pressure results fn a worker dying of asphyxiation inside a tank he's sent to clean.
In melancholy fact, two men died in Cottage Grove in an underground vault in 1986. A worker who entered the vault immediately collapsed and fell face-down into shallow water, where he drowned; a foreman who went down to rescue him also collapsed into the water and drowned. A third man who entered -the chamber likewise passed out but landed sitting up and survived. In all, two died and five were injured in the incident.
Later investigation showed the problem was a simple lack of oxygen in the vault, which had been sealed for about a year. Bacteria had steadily metabolized oxygen into carbon dioxide.
This is the reason I am lowered into the Polk Street Vault on a cable - which I am not allowed to unhook - and why Buterbattgh and Lynnes keep yelling down through the manhole at me.
"Everything going OK?"
If I don't answer, they can winch me back out to safety without climbing into the hole and succumbing themselves.
GETTING INTO the steam tunnels underneath the University of Oregon is not quite as elaborate a process as a visit to the Polk Street Vault, though it still requires a 20-minute recital of safety procedures and possible dangers, from asbestos to live steam to high-voltage electricity.
And fm asked to provide my own hard hat, flashlight and gloves for the tour, which is guided by Ron Lattion, who has worked in these tunnels five years. Lattion is cordial, but neither he nor safety manager Steve Pelkey can believe anyone would go into the tunnels for fun.
"I don't think they're interesting at all," Pelkey says. "I think they're just a miserable place to work."
"They're pretty hot inside," Lattion agrees. "Real quick, stuff starts to add up to where it's not a fun place to be."
But steam tunnel lore makes them irresistible, not just at the UO but on campuses around the country.
In a famous incident at Harvard University in 1966, then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara escaped anti-war demonstrators through a campus steam tunnel. You can find campus steam tunnel maps on the Internet for most universities in the country.
In 1979, steam tunnels acquired a demonic luster. That's when a troubled Michigan State University student disappeared amid allegations he had been playing Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy role-playing game normally played sitting at a table, in the steam tunnel network on campus. (He later turned up unharmed and working as a roughneck in Louisiana.) Both steam tunnels and D&D enjoyed brief, if probably unfounded, notoriety in the national imagination as a result.
Former DO archivist Keith Richard says the sty tunnels here used to be unlocked.
"Up until the radical period of. the 1960s, they were open," he says. "Then they were afraid someone would plant a bomb in them, and so they locked them up."
Even the governor of Oregon has steam tunnel experience.
Legends and lore aside, the DO steam tunnels prove to be just about as unromantic as Lattion and Pelkey insist they are. Being in them is rather more like crawling under your house to check plumbing than wandering into a catacomb.
The network is about 2.5 miles long, almost all of it constructed from gray, reinforced concrete. Some tunnels date back to the late 1940s; some were built as recently as 1971. The tunnels are used as conduits for all manner of utilities, from steam pipes - steam is used to heat the buildings - to electrical and computer lines.
Lattion and I enter through a locked door at the university's health services building, leaving our coats just inside the doorway at his suggestion. With hard hats and lights, we make our way toward Oregon Hall and Franklin Boulevard, following an array of
pipes, large and small, that crisscross the tunnel every hundred feet or so. The pipes force us to duck, climb or crawl our way past them, sometimes lying on our bellies on one pipe to squeeze below another one.
"There are a lot of trip hazards," Lattion says. "There are pipes and other obstacles across the walkways. We have natural gas. None of our tunnels are deemed 'confined spaces.' There is adequate entry and exit, and there is adequate air coming into the tunnel."
The air, though, is hot and dull to breathe. Within a couple of hundred feet, it's 80 degrees inside, and fm glad we've left our coats behind.
We pass occasional graffiti "Elizabeth 92 Lisa" one pipe says but for the most part, students and other would-be explorers are reliably defeated by the system of gates and padlocks securing the tunnels.
Lattion was almost defeated by it once himself.
"I came in without picking up a set of keys. The gate was open and I let it close behind me."
He laughs.
"We had to radio for someone to come let us out."
The best part of the tunnel complex is the oldest. At the Central Power Plant, an industrial building north of Franklin Boulevard where huge boilers create the steam that gives steam tunnels their name, I descend three
stories on a tight steel spiral staircase to get into the tunnel that slants underneath the Eugene Millrace and Franklin Boulevard to come up at Lawrence Hall.
A tunnel under water. Eugene's own Chunnel.
RAW SEWAGE is not a pretty thought, but the deepest place underground in Eugene is probably a four-story, underground building at the Eugene-Springfield Water Pollution Control Facility in Santa Clara.
Affectionately known to workers as The Dungeon, it houses a set of massive pumps that collect sewage from a giant adjoining underground tank. It's built deep underground the floor is 42 feet below the surface - so that everything can get here by gravity. Between here and the treatment plant, it's pumped out under pressure.
Todd Anderson, my tour guide, explains in great detail how the process works. We have walked down flight after flight of stairs to get to the bottom of the vault, which turns out to be a dry, heated and well-lighted room, on the order of a large, clean janitor's closet. The only thing that might betray what is on the other side of the concrete wall is a very slight musty aroma.
"No one knows why it's called The Dungeon," Anderson says. "Except it's deep and dark and kind of dreary."
But not that dark and dreary. As deep as we were underground, we are in a room that could have been almost anywhere. The Dungeon has a catchy name, but in the end it's more a daydream than a nightmare.
BY ANY MEASURE, the best underground place is the enclosed reservoir that sits atop College Hill.
Originally built in 1915 as an open reservoir, the covered concrete lake on the hill today was created by Stevens & Koon of Portland in a 1939 New Deal project. It holds 15 million gallons of drinking water in a large tank, 2.5 million gallons in a small one. The parking-lot-sized roof is open to the public as a neighborhood park.
As luck would have it, part of the large tank, which is divided into two halves, was empty for maintenance when I called the Eugene Water & Electric Board inquiring about the utility's deep holes in the ground. Senior engineer Jay Bozievich arranged a morning tour.
One of the reservoir's charms is that it has an angled bottom, and on the downhill side you can actually walk under it in an area known as The Catacombs for their resemblance to ancient ruins. The reservoir floor is supported by wall after wall of reinforced concrete, each perhaps 14 inches thick. Access is through a series of arched doorways that look so Roman I can't help but look for the bones of Christian martyrs lying in the dust.
But the best is the reservoir itself. At a small structure on top of the reservoir roof, Bozievich hands out flashlights and head lamps no hard hats or OSHA tapes required here - and opens a creaky metal door that leads to a wide concrete staircase, divided down the middle by a wall.
To the right, the concrete steps disappear into calm, dark water a few steps down, like steps into a swimming pool. But to the left, the staircase is open and dry. We walk in and find ourselves in unrelenting darkness. The entire interior of the reservoir is dark gray, almost impossible to illuminate, and flashlight beams make only trivial holes in the gloom.
At the bottom of one flight, we turn left and continue down a staircase with no handrail. Bozievich points out with his flashlight beam that a misstep here would send me sliding on an angled floor to the bottom, perhaps 8 feet below and barely discernible in the dark. "Notice," he says, "you can't even get the light to shine to the other side. It just eats the light up."
We reach the bottom, and Bozievich stops. At his foot is a grate, filled with water to the level of our feet We are at dead bottom, the drain at the bottom of the bathtub. Behind the wall we have just walked down, 7.5 million gallons of water loom over our heads in the next tank.
The concrete bottom of the reservoir is as clean as some kitchen floors, with just a trace of fine sediment from 10 years of holding filtered drinking water."This is a great reverb chamber," Bozievich says suddenly, and claps his hands.
The sound of two hands clapping doesn't simply echo, but growls and grows in size in a steady roar. I count seconds slowly going by five, six, seven - and still the sound hangs there, virtually undiminished.
I can still hear its vestiges at the count of 12.
"One guy brought a boom box down with 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,' " Iron Butterfly's heavy-metal rock classic, Bozievich says.
As our eyes adjust, we shine our lights around and discover we are surrounded by large concrete pillars, connecting floor and ceiling and receding as far as we can see into the darkness all around.
We are in a giant temple, Eugene's own heart of darkness, and I half expect to find Charon the boatman offering rides to the other side.
IMAGES:
