Where do the government’s most skilled and talented people go when disaster happens? Enter Mount Weather, a bunker so clandestine it might have been written into the script of a spy thriller movie.
Hidden underground under the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the complex is engineered to keep the business of government continuing as usual, even if chaos on the surface comes to an end.
Mount Weather was not a state-of-the-art bunker when it began. It was a late 1800s weather observatory station where researchers flew balloons and kites to research the upper atmosphere. It was sold from bureau to bureau through asset transfers by various federal bureaus over the decades, such as the Army Corps of Engineers’ temporary facilities.
It wasn’t until the peak of Cold War paranoia that Mount Weather was bunkered as a command center that it is today, built to ride out catastrophes we can hardly imagine.
Mount Weather is today one of FEMA’s main operation centers. The building has been owned by FEMA since 1979 and has been running disaster relief and continuity operations for a multitude of federal agencies. Security, naturally, is the supreme concern—the degree to which so much of it reduces to raw fact only just succeeds.
Well above its literal protection of the complex surrounds Mount Weather. The underground facility is nuclear-blast-proof and will protect its residents for weeks, not merely days.
It’s also a communications center, with highly sophisticated gear that will stay in contact with the country’s command structure, with military and civilian command during times of crisis.
Its location is as strategic as the rest: near Washington D.C., so the public can see it easily but out of sight and reach of prying eyes and attacks.
The building is not just an office building for bureaucrats. It’s a cornerstone of the U.S. government continuity of government program, keeping the brass humming even in doomsday scenarios. The building itself is closely monitored, and security arrangements understandably are top secret.
Mount Weather never rested on its laurels. The bunker was completely rebuilt following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack to ensure that it was suitable for the contemporary threats. The complex currently contains sophisticated systems such as crisis management and sensitive materials, where federal workers, contractors, and emergency workers can be in touch with each other during an emergency.
In its very being, Mount Weather is itself a bunker-above-bunker status—a national key to readiness. It brings into perspective the reality that behind the breaking news of the day on the front page of the newspaper and the day-in, day-out grind, some person labors in obscurity on a plan for responding to even the worst of catastrophes, caution being employed to keep the country on track when things get to their worst.