Bomb Shelter

Now that I've covered the reason for buying a new sump pump, I can get to the more exciting project...
We've pumped out the bomb shelter!

Here's how it looked when we did the house inspection:

Filled to the top with water!  So we closed it up, put some massively heavy rocks on top, and I continued to have nightmares about a kid falling in there.

After we saw there wasn't water coming over the top of the well hole, we decided to check out the bomb shelter again- maybe the flooding went down with the water table?

 No such luck!
But now we had a sump pump handy, and we decided to try to drain it.

After several hours, it was down a couple of feet --->

The next day, it was down to about 6 inches (at which point the float on the pump turned it off)  Good thing we have Wellies!

The entrance ladder was no longer there, so we used one of Mike's to check it out.



Mike went first, then I took a turn.
It was feeling pretty creepy as I descended the ladder!
SO dark- even with the flashlight.



It looks much less frightening in the photos!

The first thing Mike pulled up (right at the bottom of the ladder) was a cooking pot with a handle.
This got me all excited that there would be cool stuff inside!  But the ONLY other item in there was a ladder, in the middle of the room!

So, backing up... at the bottom of the ladder there's a doorway to the right.  You're then standing in this room.  I'd guess it's approximately 12'x12'.

Here's a photo taken from next to the ladder:

The entrance/exit is that doorway on the left.  The doorway on the right is a little closet (around 3'x2')

It looks like someone was in the process of patching the ceiling (my guess is due to leaking!)

It's kind of neat that the ladder was still standing there, and to think of the space completely filled with water all that time.

When we asked the previous owner about it, she said that an earlier owner of the house sold bomb shelters. We can see the lid of the shelter in the aerial photo that was taken in 1954, so it must have been before then.

I was hoping to find old cans of food from the 1950's- or something that told a story!  So this was kind of a let-down.  It felt a bit like when Geraldo opened Al Capone's safe in 1986.  At least we weren't on live TV!

Now the big question is whether it's going to fill back up...
Was the leak near the top, and once the water got in, it had no place to go?
Or will it slowly refill from the bottom?
Would installing a permanent sump pump do the trick?
I don't think I'd be willing to store anything in here, just because of the flooding risk.
But what COULD we do with it?  Gotta think about that some more!

Here are additional photos that I took:

Pipe that has a valve on it.

Two small pipes that come into the ceiling

Another pipe (ventilation)  

You can see where the bigger pipes come up through the grass.

They were our first clue that the bomb shelter was even there, since the lid was covered with a canoe when we first looked at the house!

I'll have to search the ground for those two smaller pipes.  They should be over near the workshop.  I wonder if they were for electric?  That seems silly- if there was ever a bomb/disaster... but who knows!

I'll eventually research to see if I can find out what company the owner that installed it worked for- maybe there are old building plans or something.