Welcome to the Diefenbunker, Canada’s Cold War Museum. This audio tour will take you four stories below ground and lasts approximately 1 hour. Use this device to start, stop, skip, or go back. Listen for this chime [chime] to signal the end of a stop.
If the front doors by the blast tunnel were damaged, there were other ways out of the Bunker. The two Emergency Exits, one here, and one in the Radio Room, are narrow, 9-meter-long chutes leading to the surface.
The chute was filled with 6800 kilograms of pea gravel so that radiation couldn’t enter the Bunker after a nuclear explosion.
Imagine a bomb’s gone off. You and your 500 fellow bunkmates have waited for the all clear—or perhaps you’ve run out of food after 30 days. You’ve been remotely monitoring the situation with a machine called a “rad sniffer”, and you hope the radiation levels above have diminished enough so they won’t make you sick.
First, you have to open the steel doors and stand inside the hatch. Then…you pull the metal lever.
Pea gravel comes flying down past you and through the grate in the floor. It would have made an incredible racket. The vacuum it creates shatters the Plexiglass bubble covering the top—you hope.
After that, there’s only one way to go – up.