A Home Under the Range

March 6, 2007 (Laramie, WY) -- Apart from the well heeled relatives of Bugs Bunny, how many Americans can say they live in a $25 million hole in the ground? Well, the occupants of the Silo House in Kimball, Nebraska, can. Designed to withstand a 1-megaton blast just one-and-a-half miles away, the former Atlas-E missile silo boasts a nuclear/biological/chemical air filtration system, and an independent electricity supply provided by generators, batteries, solar panels, and a wind turbine. The house provides its occupants with the space of a mansion — around 15,000 square feet — but with the heating and maintenance costs of a cabin. Sci-fi aficionados will be overjoyed to hear that it’s all controlled by HAL, a benevolent voice-activated computer who will open doors, turn the heating on or off, and perform a multitude of other functions (hopefully without psychotically singing Daisy while he unplugs the life-support).

Located 20 feet underground in the panhandle of Nebraska, the Silo House isn’t everyone’s vision of home sweet home. This is no country cottage. Surrounded by a nine-foot barbed wire compound fence and entombed behind steel blast doors, the dream home has two foot-thick cement walls and ceilings, containing 139,000 cubic yards of reinforced concrete and 27,800 tons of structural steel. Like a concrete cave, the bunker would stay at about 52 degrees in the winter, 55 in the summer, if left to its own devices. The site once housed a 260,000-pound intercontinental ballistic missile and a launch command center, but the end of the cold war made the silo redundant, and spelled the beginning of the site’s transformation into an unusual living space. A survivalist’s dream, the house is equipped with not one but two 300-gallon fuel reservoirs for two separate emergency generators; sensors to warn of approaching cars; and a surveillance camera above ground that swivels and zooms to display the outside world on a television in the living room. With a combination of massive, blast-proof construction, multiple power generating systems, and a stockpile of baked beans and ramen noodles, the house’s owners reckon they could hold out a year or more without having to leave their home.

Though unusual, the Silo House is not unique: many such converted silos dot the American countryside. One near Holton, Kansas, has been used as a high school for more than 30 years (no need to duck and cover there); another in Weld County, Colorado, is a museum and records warehouse; one near Chugwater, Wyoming, was formerly used as a machine shop; and as many as a dozen empty missile silos have been turned into private homes.

If you’d like to experience the cold war ambience this uniquely-appointed home, you can. The Silo House is just one stop on the fascinating Energized: Wyoming Style! tour being offered by UW’s Community Enrichment Program. The five-day tour will take in many out of the ordinary energy-related sites, and promises to give a fascinating overview of energy production options in the Mountain West region. You’ll gaze in awe at the turbines of the Ponnequin wind farm near Terry Bison Ranch; it’s huge pinwheels spinning in the Wyoming wind. You’ll visit the Antelope Valley power plant in Wheatland; and the Accidental Oil Company in Newcastle, where visitors can see thick, black oil oozing up to the surface. Wandering into Nebraska, the tour will visit Chadron State College — an institution heated entirely by wood chips — and the Crow Butte Uranium Mine, which uses an environmentally-sound in situ method to extract uranium. And, of course, you’ll have a rare chance to visit the Kimball Silo House, and imagine what the three-story deep greenhouse would have looked like when it was a ‘blast pit’ — a vent originally intended for the exhaust gases coming from a fired nuclear missile.

“Open the 47-ton steel doors, HAL…”

The Energized: Wyoming Style! tour runs Sunday April 15 to Thursday April 19, 2007. The deadline for registration is March 30. For details and to register, please contact UW Community Enrichment Program at (307) 766-6802 or visit www.uwyo.edu/outreach/enrichment/spring07/wyoming.asp.

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For more information, please contact
Sheila Atwood-Couture at
(307) 766-5641 or satwood@uwyo.edu.

A Home Under the Range

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