--- title: "There Is A Railway Station Under Denver Airport" dek: "Nineteen sheets of 1992 drawings show six floors under Concourse D. The record says three. Sheet 11 has platform edges, tactile strips and two tunnel bores — and we have never been below level three." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: The Republic author: June Halloway (fictional) published: 2026-08-06T12:00:00Z updated: 2026-07-21T16:45:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/denver-concourse-d-drawings tags: Denver, airport, tunnels, FOIA, records genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # There Is A Railway Station Under Denver Airport *Nineteen sheets of 1992 drawings show six floors under Concourse D. The record says three. Sheet 11 has platform edges, tactile strips and two tunnel bores — and we have never been below level three.* 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. > **Figure:** What is under Concourse D, by the 1992 drawings — see https://theyburied.com/article/denver-concourse-d-drawings ## 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: **Document: PX-1402, sheet 4 of 19 — general notes** ``` NOTE 11: LEVELS -4, -5 AND -6 NOT IN THIS CONTRACT. NOTE 12: COORDINATE PENETRATIONS WITH OTHER CONTRACTOR. NOTE 13: DO NOT FIELD-VERIFY BELOW LEVEL -3. ``` ## 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. > You do not size ductwork for a room you are not building. > > — Priya Venkataraman-Cole, structural engineer ## 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. > **Editor's note.** Readers kept asking what is on levels four to six. This story now says, in the second paragraph, that we do not know and have never been down there. It took two weeks and a lot of letters for us to put that where it belonged. See the [corrections archive](/corrections). ## Sources (invented) - Dolores Wisniewski-Trant, Daughter of Emil Wisniewski, sheet-metal foreman — Interviewed at her home in Aurora; gave us the drawings and the box (19 September 2025 and 4 March 2026) - Marvin Okonjo-Steele, Retired mechanical estimator on the 1992 package — Telephone, three times (Oct 2025 – Jan 2026) - Beverly Nakashima-Ruel, Retired ironworker; welded handrail on the 1993 fit-out — Interviewed in person in Pueblo (2 June 2026) - Priya Venkataraman-Cole, Structural engineer, hired by this newspaper — Written report; fee $2,400, published (11 February 2026) - Denver International Airport, Office of the chief executive — Written questions 2 April 2026; answer 24 April (April 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1402: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1402 ## What we could not confirm - That anything was built below level three. We have drawings and one witness. We have not been down there. - Where the two tunnel bores go. They leave the sheet heading north-east and the next sheet is one of the thirteen we do not have. - Who the 'other contractor' in Note 12 was. Nobody will say and the 1992 bid records are not in the archive we were given. ## Right of reply **Denver International Airport** (The airport replied on 24 April and asked that its statement run in full. It does.): > Denver International Airport has three subterranean levels beneath Concourse D. That has been true since we opened in 1995. It is in the as-built record, in every fire filing since, and in the annual inspections, all of which are public and none of which we have ever restricted. > > What you have is a bid-stage mechanical set from 1992, three years before opening. Bid drawings routinely dimension space that is never built. Scope gets cut. It got cut here. The notes you highlight — 'not in this contract', 'coordinate with other contractor', 'do not field-verify below level −3' — appear on thousands of drawing sets and mean what they say. > > We understand why this is interesting. We would ask you to print, as prominently, that we run fourteen public tours of the subterranean levels a year, that anyone may book one, and that we have offered your reporter a place on the next. > > The offer stands. Bring a camera. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.