Long-Forgotten Tunnel Revived For Homeland Defense Training.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

If you drive on West Virginia's Interstate-77, halfway between Charleston and Beckley, and blink one too many times, you may miss it. But local politicians and proponents of U.S. home land defense know it's there--the West Virginia Memorial Tunnel. The tunnel is now a training site for local, state and federal agencies preparing to handle terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

The tunnel, built in 1953 as part of the West Virginia Turnpike, was permanently closed when I-77 opened between Beckley and Charleston I-1987. The Federal Highway Administration used the facility in the mid-1990s as a test facility for ventilation of smoke from tunnel fires. Four years ago, the tunnel became a storage site for the West Virginia Turnpike.

To turn the tunnel into a training facility, Congress appropriated $5 million in fiscal 2001, and $3 million in 2000. One of the program's biggest supporters is Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.

The contractor who won a competition to transform the tunnel into a training siteis Research Planning, Inc. (RPI). Program manager Mel Wick estimated that RPI would need a total of $27.3 million to make the tunnel fully operational. After that, he noted, it will cost $5 million a year to sustain the facility and run the training.

The project was criticized as pork-barrel spending by some members of Congress, notably Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. But Byrd said the tunnel meets a legitimate counter-terrorism need. It will allow "military tacticians the opportunity to test new strategies and techniques to respond to terrorists that may attack American targets," said Byrd.

Ted Kramer, the deputy project manager for RPI, said the company broke down the project into six phases. Phase one through five include research and development of training scenarios, as well as turning the tunnel into a functional training facility. The sixth phase begins after the facility--called the Center for National Response--is completed, and it will address its long-term maintenance.

"There's no other place in the country where you can go in to this kind of an environment, and do this kind of training," said Kramer. "There have been some aboveground buildings with their interiors designed to replicate the inside of tunnels. It's just not the same. You walk in and say, 'Oh, this is a building, and now I have a small tunnel to work through, but it's still in a building.'"

According to RPI, the tunnel was 99 per cent ready for training in May, although...