In 1958 the federal government reached an arrangement with The Greenbrier, a resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The hotel would build a new wing. Underneath it, the government would build a fallout shelter large enough for both houses of Congress — about 1,100 people — for sixty days.
Most members of Congress were not told. The hotel’s guests were, in a sense, shown it: some of the bunker’s largest rooms, including an exhibition hall, doubled as convention space and were used for trade shows and meetings. The blast doors were concealed behind panels in the walls.
The doors were made by the Mosler Safe Company. The largest weighed about 25 tons and was 19.5 inches thick, and was hung so precisely that it could be opened with about fifty pounds of force.
§ 01Forsythe Associates
The facility had to be kept ready, continuously, for decades, by people who could not say what they did. For thirty years a small group of government employees worked at The Greenbrier as staff of a private company, Forsythe Associates, which was contracted to service the hotel’s televisions. There were about 1,100 televisions. The men did repair them. It took about a fifth of their time.
The rest went into the bunker: rotating sixty days of food, maintaining the power plant, the decontamination showers, a clinic, a cafeteria, two auditoriums sized for the House and the Senate, a broadcast studio with a backdrop of the Capitol that could be changed with the seasons, and a pathological waste incinerator.
§ 02Disclosure
On 31 May 1992 the Washington Post published “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway,” by Ted Gup, which described the bunker in detail. The government ended its arrangement with the hotel in 1995. The Greenbrier now runs tours. Photography is not permitted.
