Rick Scott's posts to Infiltration
Update (received 20 july 2001)
Hi Petr - Just wanted to tell you that your site is great, keep up the good work. One thing you might want to look at though is your "tunnels and underground places" page. The Wilfred Laurier University steam tunnel story is introduced as "From the United States: Rick Scott's adventures". Having myself been in these steam tunnels, I can assure you they are in Canada (as you state accurately on the right side of the page). No matter what the Americans tell you, Canada is still a separate nation! :)
Celkove, bezvadna stranka! - Ian (Jan Vanek), Toronto, Canada
Update (received 6 September 1999)
As a small update, I got a job working for Computing & Communication Services at my school over the summer, and I've now been through these tunnels legally. (It doesn't really take away from the initial thrill I had, though.) We were down there to run CAT5 network cabling around various parts of the school and to pull old telephone cable out. I've now been behind the "HIGH VOLTAGE" doors (only a pair of huge humming transformers) and a few of the other locked rooms (one storage room, one kit room containing school-logo shirts, etc and the store room for the school bookstore.)
Tunneling at WLU - Original story
I've been infiltrating, sneaking about, and doing other such nefarious activities for...well...I'd have to say, as long as I can recall. [Rick sits back in his armchair and begins to reminisce.]
I couldn't have been much older than 12 when a buddy and I got into an old, boarded-up store near my grandmother's place to see what was inside. (Not much, but it was cool anyway.) Around the same age, a chum and I got into a sawmill/lumber yard at night after it was closed. That was kinda neat - they had all these boards stacked up in big tiers, and it was fun running around in there.
When I was about 14 I was right into the ninja thing. (I still am.) I got my claws on every ninjitsu book they had down at the library and started to read. Most of the parts that demonstrated the martial arts/fighting techniques were all right, but what really intrigued me was the emphasis the ancient Ninja put on staying unseen. They'd refined inpo, the art of hiding, into an incredibly sophisticated art form. I diligently practised the techniques I garnered so; I remember many nights when I'd head out into the neighborhood just to sneak around and see how long I could stay out and where I could go without someone seeing me. Once you know how people percieve things (something the Ninja know everything their is to be known about) you'd be surprised how easy it is to be invisible. You can practically vanish and remain unseen at will.
(Note to those just getting their sneaking start: Muckle onto any books you can get by Stephen Hayes and Ashida Kim. There's a lot there to be learned, and not just about stealthing around, either.)
...I recall several trips made into the scrapyards behind Algoma Steel, out in the west end of Sault Ste Marie. And getting busted on an improptu sneak into an abandoned school. (Hey, how were we supposed to know that such a derelict place was alarmed? Besides, the doors were open.) I still have one place in the Sault where I like to go rooftopping at night, and sit there and think by myself for a while.
...now, I'm going to school in Waterloo, living in Kitchener, and I hardly seem to get the time to even do a drain any more. Which does, however, lead me into my next post...
Here's the tale I promised in a recent post, about how I *finally* infiltrated my school's steam tunnels. (I'm not sure whether or not sending this through my school e-mail address is a good idea or not, but Hell! you only live once, eh?)
Note: This is one big, longwinded post. Feel free to skip through the story - I'm sure it starts to bog down in the middle.
Well, I've been going to WLU (Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) since September, and, knowing that there had to be tunnels around somewhere, I'd been looking about for likely entrances. (For a while, I wondered if possibly the school, being so small and built piecemeal over a reasonably long period of time, had individually heated buildings, but an acquaintance of mine who works at the school told me that the heating for the Peters Building was underneath the Alvin Woods Building, I knew that my search was not in vain.)
Snooping about in the public-access basement areas of the school turned up a few likely doors, all of which were locked. The exception was a door in the bottom of one of the stairwells of the Alvin Woods Building. It was unlocked only during the day, was fastidiously locked at night, and had one of those evil "Authorized personnel only" signs on it. To further add to the temptation, one could see through the glass window that the corridor on the other side was certainly one of those "Not for public consumption" areas. (You know, the floors are lackluster, plain cement, no tiles, kind of in a permanent semi-grungy state all around). I couldn't really work up the nerve to sneak in there during the day, though, knowing that most likely there were going to be people on the other side during working hours. I checked it occasionally during the evening, but it was always locked after, say, 5 pm or so.
On the other side of the school, underneath the Peters Building, there was an equally tantalizing door that was *always* locked. It's pretty much a tip-off that some door leads into steam tunnels if (a) it's often locked, (b) what little you can see of the area beyond the door looks like the "Not for Public Consumption" type area described above, (c) a whole shitload of water pipes and insulated pipes run across the ceiling outside the door, and through the wall above the door, (d) there's a public-access underground tunnel right nearby (this one links up the Peters Building, the Library, and the Alvin Woods building.)
This door was in a pretty secluded area of the campus that I happened to pass by semi-regularly, so whenever I did, I'd give the door a try. Never open. I really started to lose hope after a while, but still gave the door a shot every now and again. (That was last October or so.)
Well, Wednesday of last week, I leaned on the door just for the hell of it, not expecting by any stretch that it would be open, but, lo and behold, my day had come. (This goes to show that apparently sheer bloody-mindededness can get you into a lot of nifty places.) I got that nifty heart-pounding feeling I'm sure that we're all familiar with - that one you get when you attain access to some previously unexplored or impregnable place.
I left the door for a few minutes while I took care of some stuff, then came back once I was free to spend a bit of time.
My entire body was positively vibrating as I pushed the door tenously open, just waiting for something to take me by surprise from the other side, as I couldn't see what or who might have been on the other side when I opened it.
The door opened into a small triangular room with pipes and an array of high voltage wires above, and a big electrical control panel on the wall opposite the door. The pipes and wires lead down a long tunnel, paralell to the public-access tunnels nearby. I slunk down it, noticing that the place was warm, but not uncomfortably so, and quite nicely lit, apparently in stark contrast to some college tunnels.
The tunnel turned a 90 degrees left after about 50m (150'), following again the contours of the public tunnels nearby, and I recognized the backside of a door that I knew lead into the steam tunnels but didn't dare try, as the public tunnels outside were one of the few areas on campus that have video cameras (due to safety concerns.)
Going left, the tunnel ran straight about another fifty metres, down two damn creaky sets of wooden stairs, (I winced at every step) and past larger pipes that seemed to carry the voices from the buildings above. (I almost turned and ran - the snippets of what sounded like conversation seemed at first to be coming from the tunnel up ahead. But on subsequent trips, these pipes are always making the same strange sounds.)
A cage on the right contained some old, dusty computer equipment with orange stickers - "PLEASE DO NOT THROW ME OUT - I BELONG TO ______________." A biit further, and past a small 'S' bend, I felt the temperature go up and heard the sound of machinery- I knew I had arrived.
The main boiler room was a fairly expansive place - three large boilers in the southwest corner of the room (right near where I entered), a bunch of huge sixties-style control panels (reminicent of the original "Star Trek", I thought), an unoccupied seat and small table, a large sliding door on the east side, and wide open double doors on the north. There was also a door in the middle of the west wall, with an ominous HIGH VOLTAGE - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign on the door. It was locked, not that I was so sure I wanted to go in there anyway.
Through the open double doors in the north wall, there was a small hallway. Locked double doors directly across with the mysterious room number "B007". To the left, another hallway leading north, and a pair of double doors set in the far wall of this hallway. They read "LOCK DOOR". Unfortunately, someone did.
Down the hallway, a door on the left lead to an apparently more human-habitable area (cleaner, white walls, etc.) I carefully edged forward, certain that someone could be in this next room, but only found what appeared to be a monitoring station in this auxilliary boiler room. A small desk had what looked like a log of chemicals added to certain vats, or boilers, and readings taken, or some such. Backing out of this room and back into the small hallway, its end I found a short set of stairs which opened onto another of the doors I'd been trying for the last eight months, certain that something interesting lay beyond. Unfortunately, this one was one way only, and wouldn't open from the outside, so I left it and went back past the main boiler room.
Past the mysterious B007 doors, through the one remaining door in that hall, I found myself in a remarkably clean short hall with a bunch of chairs. Past them, the hall backtracked on the left to what was apparently a small closet, with now-bare shelves.
Through an open door at the end of the hall, I found myself in a quiet room with a ton of huge pipes snaking through it. Moving around to the left, I encountered two 18" (45cm) or so pipes hung from the ceiling at perfect concussion-causing level. They were painted fluorescent orange; the first held the kind admonition "DUCK dummy", and the second, "I told you to DUCK." (Yes, we could make stuff like this up, but that would be a waste, considering what our explorations yield every day. =) I wonder if some worker in the past had the misfortune of frequently forgetting to DUCK, causing a co-worker to emblazon the pipes with the aforementioned warnings.)
Out the far end of the room, I came to an intersection with the main boiler room on the west, the pipe room on the north behind me, a double door on the left with what happened to be some kind of central air-conditioning room. I continued forward, and found myself in what a sign claimed was the bookstore recieving area. Ahead, a forklift and some other assorted crap, then the large garage door on the far wall. I crept up cautiously and peered out the window to see if anyone had spotted me from the outside; no one there. Back on the east wall was a pair of doors, on the back of which someone's coat was hung. Cautious for the fear that someone might be about, I opened the one of the two that was unlocked, and found that it opened on to the employee's side of the Terrace (the fast- food area at Laurier.) (There was a punch clock on the wall between the two doors; if I would have noticed that night as I did on subsequent trips that there were no punch cards in the holders, then I would have been significantly more confident that there was no one joining me in the tunnels.)
Declining to explore that further for now (as it was wide open to public view and a middling popular study space during exams) I returned to the recieving area. Trying one of two sets of double doors across the recieving area, it opened onto an area with a ton of miscellaneous custodial supplies; not all that interesting. The last door off of the recieving area read "Please keep door closed", a task made difficult by the (apparently forklift-caused) huge dent in one door that caused it to be permanently open about an inch. Down a long cinder-block hallway with a number of locked doors; the hallway turned left after about 25m (75'). I found the Alvin Woods Building elevator (this was the basement floor, which I think you can only get the elevator to bring you to if you have a maintenance key), the elevator control room (locked!) and the back of the "Authorized Personnel only" door (unlocked!) that I mentioned at the start of this long article.
Finding all there was to explore, I quickly backtracked to freshen the place in my mind a bit, then left the way I'd come.
I guess it wasn't really a surprise that the place didn't appear to have any cameras, alarms, motion detectors, etc. At least, it didn't appear to when I was there, as it's supposed to be locked at night. The campus police didn't show up to nab me on my way out, so I assume that I didn't set anything off. I didn't see any evidence of alarms or the like.
I drew a rough map of the place that night. When I returned the next day to do a detailed mapping, the door was locked, but it wasn't when I gave it a shot six days later. I've got a pretty good map of the place that I'm going to draw up electronically and distribute to anyone on the list that wants to see it (just drop me a line.) I don't have a website at the moment, and there's no plans in the works, but anyone that wants to post it on theirs will be welcome and encouraged to do so.
I also went back last night to do a brief run through of the back of the Terrace. I was in and out in a hurry, because if there's any place that had motion detectors or alarms that would be it. I didn't see any, but I wasn't taking chances. Not too much to describe - just your usual fast-food kitchen, I suppose. I guess it would be a good place for hungry, underfed people who are morally entitled to steal food, but I'm not going to push my luck by pilfering from the freezers.
Anyway, that's my first big tale of exploration. Hope I didn't bore anyone too much =) I'm thrilled that I finally found the steam tunnels at my school, and that I'm now a steam-tunnel initiate. (I think the only section of the infiltration website I have left to do is the "transit tunnels" one, Ninj, and I'm not sure that I'm going to be rushing to do that any time soon. :)
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© 1999 Rick Scott, Petr Kazil - 18 September 1999