Down in a hole: Building missile silos required teamwork between carpenters, iron and concrete workers

Remembering the Titans: Third in a series of stories prepared by the community members of the Restoration Advisory Board, appointed by the U.S Army Corps of Engineers to help with the TCE clean-up from the former Titan 1-A missile facility in Lincoln. The series focuses on the people whose lives intersected, in big and small ways, with this piece of Cold War history. Are you one of them? Contact us at CommunityRAB@yahoo.com Claude Langley was a 20-something ironworker in San Jose when his uncle in Yuba City called him with an offer he couldn't refuse. There's a big job up here, his uncle told him, and they need ironworkers who can work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Langley thought of his growing family. "It was good money," he said. "All overtime is double time and we're working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. So away I went." The big job was a set of three Titan 1 missile bases – in Lincoln, Chico and Live Oak – being built in a protective triad for Beale Air Force Base. When he got here, he realized it wasn't big. It was huge. Giant mountains of dirt greeted him as he drove up to the Titan 1-A site just outside Lincoln's city limits off Highway 193. And next to the mountains were deep, deep holes where they'd build an underground compound, along with three missile silos and tunnels connecting them all together. That's where he would spend those 12 hours a day, seven days a week. "It was impressive," he remembered. He was a long way from his childhood in rural Oklahoma, where he grew up in a house without electricity or running water. He also knew it was important work, part of a decades-long duel between two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, for nuclear superiority that came to be known as the Cold War. The three bases he would help build, each housing the newest generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, would protect his country. "They were going to load them (with the missiles) and if they shot at us, we were going to shoot back. That's what I heard." Concrete, piping, cables – and workers Looking back, the sheer numbers were daunting. When construction began in January 1960, more than a half-million cubic yards of dirt were excavated from the Lincoln site alone. In addition, each facility used 32,000 cubic yards of concrete, 300 tons of piping and 90 miles of cables, according to one Air Force tabulation. Another government report tabulated it took 3.9 million man-hours of work to complete all three complexes. At the helm was Peter Kiewit Sons, now simply Kiewit, one of the largest construction and engineering companies in the country. Kiewit had submitted the low bid of $30 million for the project, though the price would rise to more than $40 million before it was completed two years later (the first missile arrived in Lincoln on Feb. 28, 1962). Even before construction started, Lincoln city officials were preparing residents for an influx of an estimated 1,000 workers. They urged their people to send their rental listings to a construction office set up at Beale and to consider renting out any spare rooms in their homes. The Cold War was coming to Lincoln and civilians were being asked to do their patriotic duty. Langley was lucky. His grandfather lived in Lincoln and he stayed with him much of the time. Later, another relative came up to work and the two of them got a motel room in Wheatland, stopping at cafes in Lincoln or Wheatland for dinner. Of the three sites he worked on, the Live Oak location was the most challenging because it was several miles outside of town in the Sierra Buttes and there was nothing else around. "You had to remember to bring a lunch or else you didn't eat," he said. Langley, who will turn 91 in August, still has the remnants of the husky frame of someone who spent 39 years toting steel rods and installing them to reinforce buildings, bridges and other structures up and down Northern California. He has back problems, which he attributes to all those years in the field. He also has an oxygen tube that drapes down from his face and snakes along the hallway to a motorized condenser. "The doctor says I have pulmonary hypertension," he shrugs. It's a Sunday afternoon in Lakeport, where he lives with his wife, Diane, in a tidy mobile home decorated with photos of their blended families. They spent the morning in church and are now settled next to each other in reclining chairs. "There were concrete workers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, ironworkers," he said. "Everyone was there." The most fascinating – and challenging – part was building the concrete-lined missile silos themselves. It was a delicate dance, a choreography of timing and daring, each of the trades doing their part one section at a time. "We all took turns," he said. "The carpenters would get it ready (build the forms), we'd go in and put the rebar in (to reinforce the structure) and (the cement workers) would pour it." Each section measured about 10 or 12 feet. They'd get one section done and then start on the next until all 160 feet was wrapped in concrete walls that were two feet thick and solidified with steel. Timing was crucial, which only added to the daring part. Imagine being lowered by a crane on a scaffold, a dozen stories down into a hole with only a two-way radio to let the operator know when to stop. Then they'd get to work installing the rods that would provide the crucial support to ensure the concrete would hold firm as a 100-foot-long nuclear missile is lowered and raised in it. All of this while making sure you don't fall off or cause somebody else to fall. "I didn't like it," he admitted. Lincoln calmly moves on Remember the uncle who recruited him? Robert "Gene" Kennedy wasn't just another ironworker; he ran all three sites for the ironworkers. Kennedy's 98-year-old widow, Gladys Kennedy, remembers how he'd come home to Yuba City after those 12-hour days fretting about the perils of the job. "He worried about the other men working there and getting hurt," she said in a telephone interview from her Oklahoma home. Once, after visiting the site outside Live Oak, she understood why. "I thought my God," she said, as she recounted the crane that lowered the workers into incredibly deep holes, their lives seemingly hanging in the balance as they did their jobs. "I didn't know that they could do that." Langley didn't remember anyone getting hurt. Kennedy remembers her husband mentioning one injury, but it wasn't serious. "I think he just went home." An official summary of the project cited only one construction-related fatal accident, which happened when a front-end loader, a heavy-duty construction vehicle with a large bucket attached to the front, overturned and crushed the driver. The summary did not specify which site was involved. "Considering the nature of the work, the contractor had a good safety record," the report concluded. However, in 1962, the Chico base got into double trouble. In May, a blocked vent and valve created a "terrific blast" in one of its silos, destroying a missile and heavily damaging a silo, according to a report on militarymuseum.org. A few weeks later, a flash fire in another silo killed a worker. Langley moved on when the job was finished. But Lincoln wasn't finished with him quite yet. In 1968, he moved his wife and children up here. His parents had already moved to Lincoln from San Jose. Langley transferred his union membership to Sacramento. After he retired, he moved back to his native Oklahoma, where his wife died of cancer. After "moping around" a bit, he returned to California to visit old friends and married Diane, who was the widow of one of his old buddies. That was 21 years ago. He thinks back on that overtime pay the government spent on him and the others for bases that were only used for three years. The facilities were decommissioned in 1965 to make way for a better version of Titan missiles. "It was just all a lot of wasted money to my way of thinking," he said. How did Lincoln feel about their short-lived brush with the Cold War? "In review, it seems almost impossible that the citizens of a town could so calmly take the news of the closing of a $20 million facility," the editor of the Lincoln News Messenger wrote at the time. Instead of an outcry, they "mainly were curious as to what would be done with the big 'hole in the ground.' " More than a half-century later, they are still waiting for an answer. As it turns out, workers used trichloroethylene (TCE) to clean the equipment at the base. TCE is now considered toxic and it has contaminated the groundwater under those 42 acres. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is working toward finding a plan to clean up the contamination. When it will be finished? What will be the final cost? How successful will it be in making the land safe again? And so it is that the saga of Lincoln's former missile base – and the fate of the land that housed it – continues. Sandi Dolbee is the community co-chair of the Restoration Advisory Board for the cleanup of TCE at the former base. Her search for workers who helped build the base led her to a surprising discovery: Two were members of her own extended family. In the interest of full disclosure: Claude Langley is her second cousin; Gladys Kennedy is her great aunt.