Diefenbunker
Today, I concluded the Ottawa Open House by visiting the Nortel Carling Campus and the Diefenbunker. Nortel's changed very little in the four years since I've set foot in the building. However, the Diefenbunker has changed significantly.

The Diefenbunker is a Cold War bunker built by the Diefenbaker administration in the late fifties. It is a 100,000 square foot, four storey, underground structure. Last time I was there was a couple of years after DND pulled out of there (in 1995) and took everything-and-the-kitchen sink with them. Literally.

Now, seven years later, the volunteers have done a fantastic job of recreating the rooms as they were. Many of the items came from other bunkers, such as the one in Alberta that was demolished over the last few years. Now, all but the Carp site have been sealed or destroyed. A neat thing they did was to devote some of the rooms to more museum-like displays. For example, one of the rooms is dedicated to the government's basement bomb shelter guide (including a full-size mock-up), and another to all the other bunkers across the country.

In that last room, there was the full history of the bunkers in Ottawa. At first, there were to be 15(!!!) in the region. Then they scaled back to a realistic three. They actually started building the second one, and the location of the square hole has recently been declassified. It is just West of Burritt's Rapids, at the end of Dwyer Hill Road. The protrusion at the North is likely the excavation ramp. Although the Google map for that area sucks, I did get better photos from my other (high- and low-altitude aerial) sources:

I am very excited by how the Diefenbunker project has evolved, especially since it's all volunteer-run. At least, it does not have the kind of funding that a real museum has. As such, I am going to look into helping out around there. As they restore areas of the bunker, they are putting in all sorts of old electronic devices, many of which still work, or need some servicing. That feels like a worthwhile use of my spare time.