There Is A Railway Station Under Denver Airport

AURORA, Colo. — Emil Wisniewski kept everything. His daughter found the boxes when she cleared his garage last September. In the fourth one back, under a bundle of union newsletters, were six sheets of drawings for a building he helped service in 1992.

She rang us because our number was in his address book. We have still never been below level three of that building, and everything in this story rests on paper and on one woman's memory.

What the drawings show

Six floors. The published record describes three.

Levels four, five and six are drawn to full detail. Slab thicknesses. Duct sizing. Penetration schedules. Level six carries four platform edges, tactile warning strips, and a 340-metre island platform with two 7.6-metre tunnel bores leaving the sheet to the north-east.

That is a railway station. It is drawn like one because that is what a railway station looks like on a mechanical drawing.

Three notes sit at the lower right of sheet 4, in the same hand as everything else:

What the engineer said

We paid Priya Venkataraman-Cole $2,400 to read the sheets. We told her before she started that we would print her report whatever it said. The fee and the report are both in PX-1402.

Her four findings, short:

• The set is genuine. Title block, revision clouds and sheet numbering are all correct for a 1992 package.
• The lower three levels are drawn in too much detail to be space a designer merely reserved. You do not size ductwork for a room you are not building.
• Note 11 is ordinary. It means the mechanical subcontractor was not pricing those floors. It does not tell you whether they exist.
• Note 13 is not ordinary. "Do not field-verify" tells a crew not to go and measure. She has seen it four times in twenty-two years. Every time, access was controlled by somebody else.

The woman who says she was down there

Beverly Nakashima-Ruel welded handrail on the 1993 fit-out. She is 71, lives in Pueblo, and had never spoken to a reporter before June.

She says she went below level three eleven times, on a manlift, in a cage, with a badge she handed back at the end of each shift. She says the last floor was long and flat and had a trench down the middle. She says nobody told her what it was and she did not ask, because it was 1993 and the job paid.

"There was a curve on it," she said. "You could see the far end bending away. Whatever it was, it was going somewhere."

We have not been able to corroborate any of that. Her badge is gone. The staffing agency dissolved in 1998. Her account is printed because she gave it on the record, under her own name, and because leaving it out would be a decision we could not defend.

What the airport says

Three levels. The lower three were descoped in 1993 and never built.

The full answer runs below, unedited, with nothing from us underneath it. It makes a fair point that we should have made earlier: bid drawings show unbuilt space all the time, the as-built record is public, and nobody has ever stopped anyone reading it.

It also offers our reporter a place on the next public tour, which we have accepted. That tour is on 12 September and goes to level three.

We have asked to go to level four. We have not had an answer to that.