"Howard Berkowitz" wrote in message
...
In article ,
wrote:

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 22:41:09 -0400, Kevin Brooks
wrote:

If you think that such facilities can only be built in granite, think
again.
I'd be very surprised if Mount Weather in Virginia, one of the
formerly-secret (along with Raven Rock in Maryland and the
congrssional
facility at White Hot Springs (IIRC) in West Virginia) emergency
relocation
sites, was built in anything other than that Karst limestone you
ridiculed
earlier. Mount Weather and Raven Rock are both tunnel complexes.

Dunno about Mount Weather or the Congressional Continuity of Government
site located under the Greenbriar resort in Sulphur Springs, West
Virginia,
but Raven Rock (Site R) is dug into part of the Catoctin anticline (the
site is actually in Pennsylvania, just north of the Maryland border.)

The Catoctin anticline is composed of late Precambrian basalt lava flows
that later metamorphosed into the characteristic Catoctin "greenstone"
(metabasalt), which is considerably harder than limestone.

And let me make clear I wasn't saying it had to be granite specifically,
but other hard rock. Greenbriar is under a lawn--it was basically just a
fallout shelter.

Mount Pony (former Federal Reserve emergency storage site, and reportedly
used to also provide some alternate command space) , just down the road from
where I live, has recently been largely dug up (for some unknown reason),
and I did not see much evidence of largescale rock removal to get the job
done. As far as I can tell from gandering at a geological map, Mount Weather
lays west of the Blue Ridge in what is termed as the "Valley and Ridge"
geology of Virginia--predominantly limestone, and typically Karst (which
might explain the mentions in various Mount Weather sites of supporting
underground "ponds"). And the Greenbriar facility is neither "under the
lawn" (it is under the West Virginia Wing extension built onto the hotel,
and was built while the new wing was being added); nor was it necessarily
"basically just a fallout shelter" --top cover for the entrance tunnel is
listed as being some three feet of concrete topped by a varyingdepth of soil
ranging from 25 feet to a maximum of 100 feet.

Brooks