Council to decide fate of MEGHQ-FREEPORT, Kitchener's cold war nuclear shelter

As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, Waterloo regional council will receive information on Tuesday on a solution to a former crisis that was never used — a nuclear bunker built in 1966.

Across the street from Grand River Hospital's Freeport campus, on the banks of the Grand River sits MEGHQ - FREEPORT, a below-ground, 5,720-square-foot fallout shelter and post-nuclear strike operations centre.

At the time the facility was built, Freeport Hospital was known as the Freeport Sanatorium.

A floor plan of the facility, provided by the Region of Waterloo Archives shows male and female dormitories with a total of 39 beds and a large multi-table conference area with assigned seating for transportation, agriculture, engineering and a variety of other officials. 

The bunker also had offices for the fire and police department, complete with a desk for a dispatcher. A separate radio room had seating for five.

MEGHQ stands for Municipal Emergency Government Headquarters. 

"The idea was that the regional chair, the mayor of the cities of the towns, the chief medical officer, people like that, would seek shelter in the bunker and would still be able to communicate with other bunkers that were set up in other municipalities," said Stacey McLennan of the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum. 

Photos on a website devoted to urban exploration show the inside of the bunker, which had detailed radiological defence maps, and also showed the locations of other bomb shelters in the area.

"It was supposed to keep them safe and allow them to run the government from a centralized location," McLennan said.

In a page attached to the floor plan, it is written that the shelter has "a fallout protection factor of 500 i.e., the inside radiation dose will be one five-hundredth of the outside dose." 

The bunker was equipped with a 25 kilowatt electric generator, had it's own heating plant and an independent water supply and sewage system.  

"Beds, blankets and pillows are provided," according to the document.

The construction of the bunker in the mid-1960s coincided with an effort to bolster national defences, in preparation for a possible atomic explosion. At the same time, pamphlets were given out to locals explaining how they could build their own air raid shelter in the basement of a family home. 

There was a real fear among citizens that Kitchener or the surrounding area could be the victim of a nuclear strike, McLennan said. 

'Extensive structural damage'

The facility has been used to store boats by a local rowing club for about the last 20 years, said Charles Allen, assistant director of facilities with the Region of Waterloo. Local government used the bunker for storage before that. 

An environmental assessment has determined that mould, lead, asbestos, silica and mercury are all present at the site. There is also extensive structural damage to the building as water has been seeping through the concrete for many years, Allen said. 

As a result of the reports, the region recently had a discussion with the rowing club to explain that it was no longer safe to use the building. An email from the University of Waterloo Rowing Club executives to CBC indicated that a group of people went to the bunker in August to clear the boats out and found it was full of rainwater. 

"Demolition is for sure the cheapest option because of the state of the building. It would be pretty expensive to restore it into some sort of a usable state," Allen said. 

The region has estimated that a demolition would cost $225,000, according to Allen, and "initial estimates were four times that much," to rehabilitate the building. 

There isn't much that can be done with the land, as the report to regional council notes, "the property is currently zoned natural heritage conservation, hazard lands zone ... which has very few permitted uses, limited to agriculture, outdoor recreation, flood protection works or storm water management ponds."

Allen expects that whatever council decides, action will likely not be taken until the summer of 2021.