The strange, secret tunnels under UC Berkeley

The entrance to the locked mining tunnel near the Hearst Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The entrance to the locked mining tunnel near the Hearst Mining Building at UC Berkeley. Photo: Alexander Nicholson Photo: Alexander Nicholson Image 1 of / 30 Caption Close The strange, secret tunnels under UC Berkeley 1 / 30 Back to Gallery

Forget the catacombs of Paris or the abandoned tube stations of London, the walkways, lawns and historic halls of the UC Berkeley campus have their own shadowy secrets below: a series of interconnected tunnels and walkways with a strange history.

As a founding school of the Association of American Universities, UC Berkeley's campus was established in 1868. The grounds' iconic buildings, from the towering Campanile clock tower to the Doe Memorial Library, are familiar to millions, but the murky tunnels that wind below them are known to few.

The series of tunnels, primarily clustered around the central area of the campus between the Valley Life Sciences Building and the Campanile, were built in the early 1900s to carry steam from a heating plant to power the campus — and were also controversially used by some students to take short cuts between the buildings.

The steam is generated at a heating plant just northwest of Haas Pavilion, and travels through hot metal piping. The pressure is used to generate electricity, which supplies some of the energy needs of the campus and is piped to buildings where it is used for heating and cooling.

The tunnels access many of the campus's halls from below. Using the walkways as a way of travelling the campus was a terrible idea. The dank, murky tunnels, each around 7 feet high and 4 feet wide are not safe.

UC Berkeley's Undercal website warned in 1999, "one shouldn't go into the steam tunnels without a guide from physical plant services. Dangers lurk in the tunnels. The most pressing are hot steam and the probable presence of asbestos. Other possible dangers include but are not limited to heat exhaustion or physical injury, exposure to radon gas, caustic chemicals, and a multitude of other possibilities."

The tunnels were abandoned as thoroughfares soon after their creation and remained closed until the '60s, when the police reportedly reopened them during the anti-Vietnam War protests as a means of escape. From various accounts, it seems that the tunnels were open and accessible to students during the '60s and early '70s.

There is a Cal tale that during the counter-culture protests, when the campus became a focal point for a changing country at war, students chained the pro-war Chancellor’s door handles together, and he subsequently used the underground network to escape. This story remains unverified but, either way, the tunnels were soon abandoned again until they were used once more in recent years by technicians to house ethernet cables.

In 1999 underground explorer Tobin Fricke investigated the tunnels, accessing through a grate at night. "We began heading east, up campus, away from the power plant. To our left ran three large insulated steam pipes. To our right, a periodic line of industrial-looking fluorescent lamps created an X-Files-esque landscape," Fricke wrote at the time. At one point Fricke found himself under a grate: "Looking up into the moonlit sky through the welded-shut grating, a la Les Miserables, we watched a pedestrian walk overhead," he wrote.

While bored one day with his friends, student Dev Chatterji decided to investigate the network. They pried open a grate with a crowbar and ventured in, and it wasn't fun. Chatterji wrote in a Daily Cal blog post at the time, "after walking for a while we decided to take a little break under an open grate. Then we heard a low rumbling sound. Deciding not to wait and see what it was, we quickly got away from the grate and ducked down. But just as the clatter got loudest, we saw a car go over the grate. The vehicle's exhaust pipe spewed plumes of carbon monoxide downward to the spot where we had just been standing. Luckily, all we had to deal with was a mild discomforting smell."

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Chatterji speculated that the tunnels may explain why some students emerge from Dwinelle Hall in the early hours of the morning, and also how students can reach Wheeler Auditorium after it's locked up at night — one of the more adventurous places to have sex, according to former Daily Cal sex writer Emily Chung. It should be noted that in his posts Chatterli went on to describe a frankly ridiculous, since removed, conspiracy theory about how a secret, literal, underground society of university administrators named The Order of the Golden Bear, would meet in the tunnels. According to the East Bay Express, renewed interest in the tunnels from Chatterli's blogs were partially to blame for the tunnels being locked up once again.

Fricke and Chatterji's exploration of the tunnels was irresponsible at best, and worse, dangerous, leading to Ron Coley, the Asst. Vice Chancellor of business and administrative services at the time writing a response entitled "Campus Steam Tunnels are not Toys." The tunnels would soon be locked up for good.

Oddly, Cal has another hidden tunnel under its grounds, totally unconnected to the steam system and made for a totally different reason. In the early 1900s, Berkeley mining students blasted a tunnel near the Hearst Mining Building, called the Lawson Adit, beneath the campus for research and hands-on practice. A 900-foot tunnel was blown out and dug into the hills in the northeast corner of the campus.

After a series of cave-ins the shaft now stretches some 200 feet into the dark hill, and sits mostly neglected behind an unassuming locked gate (see slideshow above).

"It is an actual mine, the tunnel was dug by students with their professors watching," Scott Shackleton an assistant dean at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, and the keeper of the adit, told SFGate in 2014,"They were paid, I think, a dollar an hour."

While the mining tunnel is still occasionally explored today to study the Hayward Fault, after 9/11 extra security measures were installed on the grates to prevent any further access to the underground network of steam tunnels, and it remains locked to this day.

From powering the campus through steam or ethernet, to providing short cuts between buildings or escape routes for imprisoned chancellors, the strange history of UC Berkeley's underground network of tunnels is currently locked up and buried once more — until its next chapter.