| This Building is the Epping Forest District Council Training and Emergency Centre. The trip to the the centre was organized some time ago and a number of Subbrit members visited the bunker on 5th January 2000. The bunker is outside the perimeter of North Weald Air field, and was once part of the airfield acting as the operations room. Also in the compound which contains the emergency centre is another surface block house which was used as a de-contamination centre during the war (it now contains plant used by the airfield and some documentation storage). The block house was converted to the council's emergency in 1986. What the council had before this I don't know, they also have a emergency centre at their council offices in Epping town centre which has no protection. |
The shot on the left is from the front left hand side of the building
by the main gate.
You can just make out one of the entrances behind the fence in the middle of the picture below.
This is another shot of the block house, just off the left of the photo is the other block house which acted as a de-contamination centre during the last war.
Another view of the block house from just inside the main gate showing the path to the main entrance.
This shot shows the 8 inch thick blast door which is steel and concrete, when we visited the bunker, we shut and locked the door, it was not easy and would have made a good air tight seal with the large rubber seal around the edge of the door. There is a normal wooden door on the outside of the building to hide the blast door but this would not give any protection.
This is another view of the main blast door, it shows the real size of these blast doors, weighing in around 1/2 ton each.
You are now looking from the main entrance into the bunker, just off to the left is the entrance to plant room and a small communications room. At the end of the corridor you turn right and come into the main control room.
This is the door to the plant room, it is just in from the main entrance on the left hand side, most of the internal doors in the bunker are steel gas tight doors with two large handle locks and can also be locked with a key.
The plant room also contains the filtration equipment which is shown in this photo, were the piping leaves the room to go to the outside there are small blast doors so that the bunker can be totally sealed. This would have meant the air inside would have just been re circulated.
Another two pictures showing the filtration equipment and some of the switching gear, there is also a handle on the filtration pump so that if the power fails the equipment can still be operated by hand.
The lady in the photo is standing at the end of the corridor after you come in through the front door and is now standing on the balcony above the main control room, to the left there are three small anti rooms for senior staff, one room is now used by RAYNET members
This is another view of the control room, at the far end of the picture would have been another wall making a small ish anti room, this has been removed to make the control room larger
Looking from the other direction, you can see the anti rooms at the back of the control room. The room on the far right is the one used by RAYNET.
This picture was taken from the far end of the balcony were the above photo was taken, to my left is the control room, behind me is a small eating area, to my right a small kitchen and another small anti room, (I'm not quite sure what this room was used for). In the roof of this photo are water tanks which run almost the length of the corridor, about two thirds of the way down on the right is the entrance to the male and female toilets and at the bottom of this corridor you turn right towards the emergency exist.
Male and female toilets, but I'm not sure which one was which.
This Faraday Cage which was not in use was in the anti room at the end of the corridor, there was not equipment in the cage because when I tried to move it, it did so quite easily. Behind me is another door which leads into another room which contains a shower which I presume would have been used for de-contamination on entry to the bunker.
This is the shower mentioned above, to the left of this is another door which leads to a small corridor and three other doors, one being the emergency exist, another being to the back up generator and the last one to the switching gear.
The emergency exist is at the back of the building and is built into the outer blast wall of the old block house, the space between the old blast wall and the main block house has had a room added and strengthened to make extra room. This door had not been opened for some time and the entrance was quite heavily over grown.
As you may have noticed there does not seem to be any permanent sleeping area, but I presume that camp beds could have been put up either in the corridors or the canteen area. The future of the emergency centre at the time of visit was uncertain as was a lot of the airfield, one member of Subbrit did offer the council a large sum of money for the centre to preserve it as a museum, but this was turned down as the land was worth more for building houses on. Weather this will be the case after 11th September 2001 is uncertain as the council may now decide to retain the emergency centre as it is gas tight.
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