Text Fwd: "U.S. Nuclear Command Headquarters Goes Cold After Water Main Break" Global Security Newswire, Jan 7, 2011

* Image source: same as the link

(Jan. 7) - The headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, now U.S. Strategic Command, shown soon after its 1957 construction. A main water line at the headquarters burst last month, flooding 13,000 square feet at the aging facility (U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency photo).

* Text fwd from Frank Cordaro on Jan. 8, 2010


Global Security Newswire
Friday, Jan. 7, 2011
U.S. Nuclear Command Headquarters Goes Cold After Water Main Break
By Elaine M. Grossman

WASHINGTON -- U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command might have
been tracking Santa's airborne sleigh during the Christmas holiday, but back on Earth, several feet of water was flooding the nation's nuclear weapons headquarters (see GSN, Feb. 2, 2006).

(Jan. 7) - The headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, now U.S. Strategic Command, shown soon after its 1957 construction. A main water line at the headquarters burst last month, flooding 13,000 square feet at the aging facility (U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency photo).

A rupture last month in a main water line at U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb., led to several days of power, heat and plumbing outages, as well as a failure in the facility's e-mail system, Global Security Newswire has learned.

An estimated 5 feet of water inundated the facility's boiler room, according to Julie Ziegenhorn, a Strategic Command spokeswoman.

At the peak of the deluge, 13,000 square feet at the headquarters were underwater, she said in a written response to questions. The facility includes a vast underground operations center, built seven floors below the surface at the height of the Cold War.

Located at Offutt Air Force Base, Strategic Command has combat responsibility for the nation's nuclear-armed ICBMs, bomber aircraft and submarines. The organization would be charged with issuing military orders to carry out any nuclear strikes approved by a U.S. president.

Over the years, the command's portfolio has expanded considerably to include space, cyberspace, global missile defense, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The organization also coordinates defense efforts to combat weapons of mass destruction around the
world.

Pipes burst on the evening of December 20, as the mercury dropped from a daytime high of 41 degrees Fahrenheit to below freezing.

When key utilities failed, staffers in dozens of offices were told they could leave work early, sources said. "The headquarters maintained contact with all personnel via phone and some network capabilities during the incident," the spokeswoman said.

Even e-mails sent to Strategic Command brass, though, bounced back to senders for more than four days during the outage, GSN confirmed.

Strategic Command sought to characterize the impact as minimal.

"Most areas, aside from the boiler room, were accessible throughout the entire incident and repair time," according to Ziegenhorn. "For two work days, only critical operational functions were manned due to power, cooling, heating and potable water limitations."

The official was unable by press time to specify the dates during which the most critical outages occurred.

The events did not force Gen. Kevin Chilton, the Strategic Command head, to shift any military responsibilities to emergency airborne command posts or other backup facilities, his spokeswoman said. No emergency evacuation was required.

"Throughout the incident, [the command] remained capable of performing all missions without interruption or impairment," Ziegenhorn said. "Complete building functionality was restored within five days of the incident."


Command sources report, though, that partial outages continued even after Christmas. As temperatures plunged into the single digits on December 26 and 27, utilities were not yet fully restored and many personnel were again sent home early, according to sources who asked
not to be named, citing the sensitivity of the issue.


"I don't think they initially understood how much damage had been done," said one defense contractor. "They lost their boilers, they lost their heating systems, they lost their water, they lost a great deal of their electrical power, [and] they lost their ability to flush toilets."


Slightly more than 2,300 personnel work at Strategic Command, though many were on holiday leave when the water main broke.

The Strategic Command spokeswoman said there was "no record of a similar event occurring." No cost estimate for repairing the damage was available yet, she said.

The headquarters, built in 1957, has been hobbled repeatedly by electricity failures, fires and floods, Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last March.

The 1.06 million-square-foot building has "weathered the five decades with little renovation," the lawmaker said. "The facility's shortcomings and problems are well known. They've put STRATCOM's mission and its personnel at some risk."


A spokesman for Nelson declined a request for comment this week.

Over the years, "technology's evolved and we started using computers, bringing a lot of computer capability into this infrastructure that was absolutely not designed to handle that," Chilton said at the March 26 hearing. "So heat loads [and] working space conditions are intolerable in some areas for some of our people."

Nelson secured an initial $10 million earmark in fiscal 2009 Air Force funds to begin design studies on a new $564 million Strategic Command headquarters.

Design work has continued into fiscal 2010 and 2011, using $25 million in additional appropriations, according to Monique Farmer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Omaha. The corps is charged with overseeing plans for the new facility and its
construction.

Blueprints for a 1.09 million-square-foot replacement headquarters are now roughly 75 percent complete, said Vincent Turner, chief of military programs at the Corps of Engineers' Omaha office.

The organization anticipates completing the designs by June, releasing a solicitation for construction the following month, and by year's end awarding a contract to build the facility, Turner said this week.
Pending congressional action later this year on fiscal 2012 appropriations, construction should begin next year, he said. Barring some unforeseen hitch, the facility should be complete by December 2015.

"The recent incident in December makes it that much more imperative we move forward with plans for the design and building of a new headquarters facility," the Strategic Command spokeswoman said.

The new headquarters addresses "deficiencies of the current facility," Ziegenhorn said, noting it would offer "reliable and sustainable power and support systems." It is not expected to include, though, the deeply buried bomb shelters featured in the existing building as a means of surviving an all-out Soviet nuclear attack.

"I don't believe we need that any more today," Chilton, who is expected to retire from active duty early this year, said last March. "We're working very hard on the design of a new infrastructure and facility to take us into the 21st century and [support] what this command needs to do its missions in the future, and I'm satisfied we're on track."