LA Times: Campus Tunnels Around Calif.
David Harmon
At campuses across the nation, undergrads insist on making rumors about
utility tunnels into the stuff of legend.
By Tony Barboza
August 19, 2007
On the first day of UC Irvine English professor Carol Burke's
Introduction to Folklore course, she asks students to write down any
unusual stories they've heard about their campus.
Someone always mentions the tunnels.
Rumored to have been built as escape routes for professors and as access
points for National Guardsmen during student protests in the 1960s, the
1 1/4 -mile concrete corridor runs in a circle below the campus'
original buildings, connecting to building basements and vaults.
School officials say they don't know where the rumors started; the
passageways were built in 1964, well before most student demonstrations,
and they house only heating and cooling pipes.
Because of security concerns, UC Irvine and other universities across
the country are sealing off tunnels that have drawn curious students and
urban explorers, played host to hazing rituals and pranks and sparked
urban legends, such as the one about mutant radioactive rabbits.
UCLA has blocked off areas of its 6-mile tunnel system. Columbia
University is securing its tunnel entry points with new doors, locks and
card readers. Stanford, which used to count tunnel exploration as a
campus tradition, recently invested in chains, padlocks and gates to
keep students out of its 10-mile system after officials discovered that
some of them had ventured under the main quadrangle -- alarmingly close
to the president's office.
UC Irvine is the latest to install a sophisticated security system for
its tunnels. The university is spending up to $300,000 on motion
sensors, alarms, closed-circuit cameras and card readers to replace the
old locked gates that weren't entirely successful in keeping students
out, said UCI Chief of Police Paul Henisey.
"There's a lot of people on campus who have no idea where these tunnels
are or how to get into them," said Paul Howland, director of plant
operations. "We want to keep it that way."
Since 9/11, universities have been looking for anything that could make
them vulnerable to terrorism, said Lisa Sprague, president-elect of the
International Assn. of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.
"Steam tunnels have come to the attention of universities just because
of their safety hazard and their enticement to students and others to be
adventurous," she said.
Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, said
bouts of school violence such as the Virginia Tech shootings "have made
colleges and universities once again focus on how vulnerable the
buildings and campus are to a person seeking to create havoc."
Even without the threat of terrorism, campus officials call the
passageways an "attractive nuisance," an intriguing part of the campus
landscape that is a liability to schools if not locked and monitored.
Some colleges, such as the University of Michigan and the University of
Washington, said their tunnels have been secured in recent years but
would not provide details. Others, such as Princeton and Caltech, were
so concerned about tunnel details falling into the wrong hands that they
would not comment for this article.
Utility tunnels are common at large building complexes that share a
central heating and cooling plant. The passageways serve as a
distribution system for water and steam that regulate the temperature of
buildings, as well as fiber optics and other wiring.
They serve as the subterranean arteries for civic centers, medical
facilities and many colleges and universities, giving workers easy
access to repair aging pipes and wires.
"Without this, we would have to dig big holes in the campus every time
we had to work on a pipe," UCI's Howland said on an increasingly rare
tunnel tour.
Despite their utilitarian role, the tunnels for decades have spawned
urban legends and conspiracy theories among students.
"They didn't want another Berkeley," said Joel Montano, a fourth-year
sociology major at UCI, recounting the prevailing theory that the
tunnels were built for riot control.
At Johns Hopkins University, a rumor circulated in the mid-'90s that
mutant rabbits from an underground nuclear experiment lived in tunnels
below a physics building there.
Burke, the English professor and folklorist, calls the fascination with
entering the tunnels an example of "legend tripping," an age-old
practice in which a group of young people investigate a storied place
for themselves.
"The subterranean world is really handy to make the site of legendary
happenings," she said. Because of their hidden nature, tunnels have at
nearly every university developed a distinct mythology, she said.
At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., she said, students call
their campus tunnels the Ho Chi Minh Trail and say they have used them
to haze first-year midshipmen.
UCLA's six miles of steam tunnels became the stamping grounds of
fraternities, partyers and adventure-seekers, if the bottles, cans and
graffiti they've left behind are any indication, said Gail Cowling,
executive officer of UCLA General Services. The university began to seal
off the tunnels in 1984 to boost security for the Olympics.
UC Riverside's 2.75 miles of tunnels, constructed in the 1950s, were
known for their own brand of pranks and revelry in the campus' early
years.
The night before Halloween in 1963, a group of students used the steam
tunnels as a route to plant a prank paper-and-wire pumpkin stuffed with
ducks and chickens inside the library, said UCR spokeswoman Kris
Lovekin.
But since workers installed steel doors and locks on the entrances to
the 6-foot-diameter tunnels more than a decade ago, the stories have
begun to fade.
"It's not like there are trap doors at the bottom of every lecture
hall," said Jim Brown, manager of the university's television studio,
housed in a basement near a door to a tunnel, now locked. "Nowadays it's
impossible to get into any of the steam tunnels. They've gone around and
changed all the locks."
Maulik Shah, 26, crouched and crawled through Stanford's tunnels a
handful of times as an undergraduate, once using them during a game of
capture-the-flag.
In 2000, exploring the Stanford tunnels was included in the university's
alumni magazine alongside fountain hopping and scavenger hunting as one
of the top 100 things to do before graduation.
Until recently, Shah, who has documented his forays with maps and photos
on his website, received e-mails each May from graduating seniors asking
for details on how to get inside.
His visits to campus as an alumnus give some indication why the tunnel
seekers have now stopped writing.
"All the places that I used to go in are all pretty well locked up," he
said. "Maybe the tradition has just been forgotten because it's so much
harder than it used to be."
Burke, the UCI folklorist, said that with access cut off, the tunneling
ritual may fade, but the stories will not.
"The legends will still be around because they speak to this
subterranean world where strange things happen," she said.
Montano, the UCI sociology student, agrees. Knowing the tunnels exist,
he said, will always generate outlandish tales, like the rumor that they
were used to transport criminals who were being used as secret test
subjects in phrenology experiments.
And though he has never tried to enter the tunnels himself, others
apparently have.
At least two police reports this year have documented graffiti and
attempts by students to enter the tunnels.
But according to recent UCI graduate Zach Singerman, most students who
set out for the elusive tunnels usually find only the sewer system.
"College-aged kids tend to do stupid things, and it's probably not a
good idea to have them traveling under the campus," Singerman said. "But
it would be fun to go down and see them," he said of the tunnels.