Tunnel Rats
The following is an excerpt from Urban Explorers, Crawling and Climbing Into the Past, by Carolyn Hughes Crowley. The Washington Post, Sunday, December 30, 2001; page F08
At some colleges, teams of students explore the supposedly secret, six-foot-high tunnels that carry electricity and steam across the campuses. At Virginia Tech, a 21-year-old from Richmond named Mike (who asked that his last name not be published) estimates that about 10 students explore that campus's six miles of tunnels. Some are dimly lit; most are pitch black. "Temperatures are above 100 degrees and the humidity is near 100 percent," says Mike. "You expect a dank smell, but it's like the combination of a cave and an apartment building's laundry room. You hear hissing sounds of escaping steam, echoing over and over because the pipes are expanding. They make creaking, groaning, ticking sounds, which travel the length of the pipe and may seem like footsteps." Despite the thrills, Mike got the scare of his life exploring them. One night, he was prowling though a tunnel dressed inappropriately in a winter coat. He started overheating and tried to escape quickly. He kept getting hotter. "My mind played tricks on me," he recalls. "It seemed as if the tunnel was getting smaller and I was getting bigger. Finally -- not soon enough -- I got to the end. Trying hard to get out at a grate, I met a cockroach doing as I was." Mike was lucky. Capt. Billy Cardwell of the Virginia Tech Police Department, which has caught a couple of explorers in the past year or two, says: "Tunnel rats face a lot of dangers. Steam lines are better than 212 degrees and their pressure is 600 pounds, which means they are subject to burst, especially during start-up every fall and after a boiler goes down. Then it creates steam and cooks the person, removing his skin, and he dies quickly."
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