Buyer or investors sought for abandoned missile site

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001890384_missile29m.html

Monday, March 29, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.

Buyer or investors sought for abandoned missile site

By Ray Rivera
Seattle Times staff reporter

BATUM, Adams County — Bari Hotchkiss envisions a day when sightseers flock to his 57-acre plot of land, though looking at it, you couldn't imagine why. The desolate swath 35 miles northeast of Moses Lake is little more than mounds of dirt and sagebrush encircled by a forbidding chain-link fence.

But what rests underneath, he says, is a link to our nation's history. Five stories below the surface sit more than a dozen shock-proof structures connected by thousands of feet of tunnels. Three hulking silos descend 155 feet. Forty years ago, each housed a nuclear-tipped Titan I rocket aimed at the Soviet Union.

The site is among dozens of early nuclear-missile complexes that dotted the landscape at the height of the Cold War. The sites were later abandoned and sold for scrap, and they now occupy one of the most bizarre segments of the real-estate market.

(more)

i was watching one of those "home shows" a few months ago, and it showcased one that had been renovated into a home...
pros: no summer cooling costs, no winter heating costs, lots of space
cons: no windows, remote location, utter total complete silence, lots of work making it livable

<snip>
He also could convert it to industrial use, he says, or sell it outright. His asking price: $3.4 million. Hotchkiss purchased the property for $275,000 in 1998, according to records kept by the previous owner.

He's pitching his vision for the missile complex in that inevitable meeting place of the quixotic and the commercial: eBay.

(amazing, isn't it?)

Not an editorial...