The Weather Notebook: Mt. Weather

Mt. Weather
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook.

Mount Weather is not really a mountain at all but a 1750-foot solid rock plateau in the Virginia Piedmont, about 48 miles from Washington, D.C.. It began its federal career innocently enough in 1902 as a testing site for weather balloons and kites, under the auspices of the Department of Commerce. Had things ended there, Mount Weather would have earned a whimsical footnote as the launch site of the world's highest flying kite. But during, the Cold War Mount Weather underwent a mysterious reincarnation.

Revolving kite and balloon shed at Mount Weather Observatory. NOAA Photo Collection
When the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949, the US government scrambled to find a secure spot near Washington where the president and key officials could be quickly evacuated in the event of nuclear attack and Mount Weather was it.

During the 1950s, the mountain's exceptionally hard and fault-free Precambrian basalt was tunneled into and hollowed out to create a kind of doomsday super-bunker. A five-foot thick blast-proof steel door was placed at the entrance; concealed inside were vast ponds of drinking water and ammunition caches; there was even a weather station to monitor wind-borne radiation and a television studio from which the president could broadcast reassuring speeches as well as watch the soaps.

Then the cold war ended but Mount Weather remained as a secure installation, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. . Most recently following the terrorist attacks on September 11, several Washington newspapers reported that government leaders and the president's family were taken to an "undisclosed location", which many believe was the Mount Weather facility.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by the National Science Foundation. Thanks today to writer, David Laskin of Seattle, Washington.