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Tanuki
Location: Victoria, BC Total Likes: 1 like
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 160 on 10/11/2005 11:18 PM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Posted by kowalski Actually, if a tunnel is being used for stormwater drainage, it has almost assuredly always been used for stormwater or combined sewer drainage. Drainage tunnels must maintain a downward grade. If I'm digging a tunnel for people, probably surreptitiously and informally, I'm not going to be worrying about maintaining a consistent, downward-sloping grade between 1-5%. | I was also thinking that, but one of the main purpose that commonly comes up for these secret tunnels is to transport stuff from ships in the harbour to the stores downtown. Which would mean that you would want direct tunnels going from under downtown to the harbor, which is exactly what the stormdrains do. Also, if the tunnels were built using the old ravines underneath the current ground level of the city, simple geology would ensure that they were also adequate storm drainage systems. But that's just a theory, and I'm not particularly attached to it. As interesting as the stories are, I'd much rather be crawling around in tunnels than talking about them, regardless of their origins. But perhaps if there are secret apartments under the city, if I crawl through enough stormdrains I'll come across them. Any access to secret tunnels from ground level would have long ago been sealed, but I doubt they would be so diligent about sealing off accesses from storm drains.
[last edit 10/11/2005 11:35 PM by Tanuki - edited 3 times]
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| Tanuki
Location: Victoria, BC Total Likes: 1 like
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 161 on 10/11/2005 11:34 PM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Posted by BimmiN
I guarantee they have all waterflow mapped out very accurately. I work for a Gov't corporation that deals with some of this stuff and they have very comprehensive maps of all rivers, creeks, streams and drainage paths. They have to keep this maintained and up to date in case of blockage or overflow...
| I'm not saying that there aren't maps. There are maps, I have them. But they are often inaccurate. I know this from having the map and going to the actual location and finding that they often don't match. I just really don't think they have a need for particularly accurate maps. They couldn't care less whether or not it's a 3 foot high or 5 foot high tunnel, but I do. And it seems that they only update them once every 20 years. They were mapped out in the 60's, in the 80's, and then in 2001. I haven't found anything earlier than that. The CRD may have maps, but if so I haven't found anyone who works there that is aware of them. If they ever have a need for a map, they probably just go dig through the city archives like I did. The municipalities are all kept separate, which is a bit of a pain. But if you have connections, I would be appreciative of any leads you could give me for additional places to find maps...
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| anvil
Gender: Male Total Likes: 0 likes
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 162 on 10/13/2005 10:19 AM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Tanuki: "The CRD may have maps, but if so I haven't found anyone who works there that is aware of them. If they ever have a need for a map, they probably just go dig through the city archives like I did. " "No, the CRD doesn't have maps of Bowker Creek. Like I said in my previous post, they leave that to the non-profit society. They also don't have maps of the storm drains either, that you have to look in city archives for, and Victoria, Oak Bay, and Saanich are all kept separate." "I'm not saying that there aren't maps. There are maps, I have them. But they are often inaccurate. I know this from having the map and going to the actual location and finding that they often don't match. I just really don't think they have a need for particularly accurate maps. They couldn't care less whether or not it's a 3 foot high or 5 foot high tunnel, but I do. And it seems that they only update them once every 20 years. They were mapped out in the 60's, in the 80's, and then in 2001. " "If you do have any luck getting maps from the CRD, let me know. Even having friends of mine who work for them discretely enquire hasn't turned anything up. " "But if you have connections, I would be appreciative of any leads you could give me for additional places to find maps... " So, those elusive, inaccurate maps that don't exist are a bone of contention here. Hmmm, let's see what we can find through a bit of old fashioned research.....oh, wait.....what's this????? http://www.crd.bc....wkerCreekWater.pdf - see "figures" (page after page of detailed maps) In addition, the CRD has completed comprehensive reports (350+ pages) on stormwater quality, which includes detailed maps, analysis and discussion of major water courses "includes Colwood, Esquimalt, Langford, Oak Bay, Saanich, Victoria and View Royal, plus Department of National Defence and First Nations" - in short - ALL of the water drainage in Greater Victoria. Which includes Bowker Creek. And its tunnels. And I'm guessing that the municipalities have detailed maps of the storm drains, sewers, and other subterranean features that lie under the ground. Not all. But most.
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| Tanuki
Location: Victoria, BC Total Likes: 1 like
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 163 on 10/14/2005 12:19 AM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Nice find. You do seem to be good at digging up information even if you are ornery. But, like I keep saying, I already have detailed, accurate maps of the Bowker Creek tunnels from the Friends of Bowker Creek. Those tunnels were created relatively recently and are well known and documented, and easy to find. So I'm not particularly interested in finding more maps of them. What I am very interested in is maps of the drainage systems of the rest of Greater Victoria. The ones that I have found are incomplete and inaccurate. If I tell you that better maps don't exist will you go find them for me, or can I just put in a polite request? And if you would like to further elucidate this report you are talking about, I would be very interested. When was it completed? Is it publicly available? Where did you find information on it? It sounds very interesting. But I'm not holding my breath, what bureaucrats consider to be a detailed analysis is often just paying a consultant to tell them how wonderful they are... Incidently, it looks like the maps in the report you found are from the Friends of Bowker Creek. The CRD paid a private consultant to prepare the report, and they got their maps from the Friends of Bowker Creek. But as this is an incredibly stupid and unproductive argument to be in, I will not continue it any further. I was merely trying to tell people where they should look if they actually wanted maps to explore the tunnels.
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| anvil
Gender: Male Total Likes: 0 likes
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 164 on 10/14/2005 2:07 AM > | Reply with Quote
| | | "You do seem to be good at digging up information even if you are ornery." Six years doing historical and anthropological research will do that to a guy..... The Bowker Creek maps were commissioned, paid for and are the property of the CRD. As for maps of other subterranean features, a polite request or a denial would be adequate. Either one works. Problem is, I'm not in Victoria, so unless the information can be sleuthed out on the internet, or it happens to be in one of the books in my library, you're probably better located and able to find information. Have you looked in the City of Victoria archives? Provincial archives? The report is also in the CRD website. There are several. Here's the link: http://www.crd.bc....ter/monitoring.htm And no, I didn't read the entire thing. Just scanned it a bit. Pretty sure that its reasonably comprehensive. "as this is an incredibly stupid and unproductive argument to be in" Agreed. How about: don't shoot me down when I suggest something...i.e. the CRD has maps of Bowker Creek, and I won't have to expend all this time and energy proving my point (however trivial it might be) ........Deal?
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| KublaKhan
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland Total Likes: 207 likes
With Satan, it's always gimmie, gimmie.
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 167 on 10/14/2005 4:15 AM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Well now. This little discussion seems to be steaming along quite nicely. Tanuki has produced some interesting evidence on my beloved tunnels fable. We met recently and poured over some plans, schematics, etc. etc. fortunately, he's more adept at reading these things than me, and his explantation was very thorough. Drains and more drains and something that might be a drain but is big and full of spiders and there's a connection to that Meth-head girl I spoke with a few weeks ago and the thing she told me may well be true. Who knows...? The stories I've collected my well be far fetched, may well be the disconnected ramblings of junkies and vagrants, but they point to very specific points of evidence, and are more often than not related to very real aspects of the city's subterranean infrastructure.
| "The truth is knowable. But probably not, ever, incontrovertible." --Don DeLillo PICS |
| bailey_ca
Location: Victoria BC Gender: Male Total Likes: 0 likes
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 168 on 10/14/2005 8:28 AM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Posted by KublaKhan Here's the latest twist. About ten feet below Johnston St, just off the foot of the bridge, is a ante-chamber that connects Store St. Pandora and Johnston Streets (respectively) , and then connects to Yates St and then makes an angled turn and connects Broad Street. All those purple-tiled sidewalk thingies are part of the system. The Yates Street tunnel is real REAL (so the guys says) and that he's actually BEEN IN IT recently. He told me he can walk throughout downtown Victoria and never touch street level.
| It all seems like this is getting worked up a bit too much. Victoria is a relatively old city; ie, it's older than we are. This immediately makes it "interesting". If you look at archive pictures, you'll see all sorts of interesting things: The HBC stockades used to be built into the retaining wall of Wharf near the Boom Boom Room, streets have been realigned and filled in, and they used to run coal from Wharf/Johnson (what was once a working harbour) up to the working city (now Old Town.) While I compeletely agree that the existence of this old network of stuff is interesting, and well worth checking out, I think people may be putting too much of a "oooooh, forbidden!" slant on it. Yes, there's a network of tunnels under the city. Much like Seattle, a lot of them are just basement storerooms of old businesses. Neat, but certainly not worth the panache people are giving them. Those skylights in the sidewalks? They really are just skylights. They provide light to the basements of old buildings. Guess what? A lot of them have Sprint fibre lines strung through them now. No, really, my father surveyed a lot of it. If you want into the "secret" underground of Victoria, I'd suggest you cozy up with the owners of one of the old buildings downtown. Maybe they'll let you into their communication rooms. Don't get me wrong, I love all the stories about Victoria, and I completely agree that there's a lot of unexplored basements in Old Town but, in reality, there's probably a modern elevator that goes to several of them. A lot of the entrances to the old supply lines from Wharf -> Government have simply been bricked up. Yes, they exist, but there's not that many stories to go with them. Victoria is not laid out on a pentagon. The Parliament points directly north because it fits the land well that way. The Empress is built on top of silt on James Bay, but it doesn't have a 14-storey basement; it was just progress; they filled in James Bay and built an iconic hotel on it so that when ships rounded Laurel Point, they would see THAT. (Odd, that even back in the early 20th century Victoria was already a whore to tourism!) (And furthermore, some simple sluething will show you that the weird tunnel near the Budget car lot [which is currently being removed?!] is the tunnel from the Empress to the laundry facilities it had; long gone, but that's all it is. A big tunnel where people took dirty bed sheets. There's some interesting stuff in Victoria; the Janion has fascinated me since I was young. The Oriental is just plain beautiful (and I would like to personally punch whoever broke in an tagged the old lead glass windows). The network of boarded up alleys in this city is staggering. I used to live in Paper Box Arcade (aka 762 Johnson, aka "everyone has lived there".) It's nothing spectacular; just an old building renovated to meet modern standards. You have no idea how disappointed I was when I discovered that, not only was my place really just an old hotel, but the wing I lived in that originally seemed to be an addition was just that: A weird, architectural flourish. (The west wing was torn down barely 10 years after it was built. Even more odd.) My exploration of the basement yielded nothing. No tunnels, no doors, I did not suddenly surface behind Capitol Iron after walking 20 minutes through a storm drain. I did, however, share the same space as the Oriental, the Soda Works, Ivanhoe's and Il Terazzo. And I can tell you, what's interesting in Victoria lies *above ground*. The abandoned alley network is insane. Starting in Bastion Square, you could, at one point, walk Commerical Alley to Yates, then take Oriental Alley to what is now a parking lot behind 762 Yates. At one time, it was a court yard with liveries. You could turn left to walk through the Arcade behind my old building to Waddington, right to walk up past the Ivanhoe to Government or go straight through to Market Square. And that's just that one little area. The Soda Works is insanely cool. I shoved my camera under the "garage door" one night and snapped pictures. Nothing but a big, open loading bay and a lot of dirt. But if you climb out onto the roof of my old apartment and look at the Soda Works, you get a whole new perspective: It's done for. It's roof is collapsing, and it has a tree growing through it. Exploration is great, but condoned exploration is something this city sorely needs. All of my attempts to start a "Doors Open Victoria" have failed. Sure, some of the UE mystique is wrecked when the city willingly opens up buildings, alleys and tunnels, but wouldn't it be great if they'd allow it? C
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| bailey_ca
Location: Victoria BC Gender: Male Total Likes: 0 likes
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 169 on 10/14/2005 8:36 AM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Posted by lopix I lived in Victoria for a few years a while back and heard about the tunnels as well. For all my invesitgating, I found squat. Rumour had it that they were for the heroin/opium smugglers from the turn of the century, or that they form a pentagram due to the massive satanic influence in the area. Whatever may or may not have been there, not much left that I could find. Mind you, this was my start in UE and did not know how to check things out the way I do now, nor was there an internet to search for further info. Would love to have found them though!
| I'm pretty sure they existed as an escape route for the dealers, but they have folklore... My father, who grew up in Victoria in the 50s, faced a threat by my grandmother: If he didn't behave, she was going to take him down to ChinaBlock (then called ChinaTown) and throw him down a manhole where the Chinese would sell him into the slave trade. It was, as she says, a different time. Apparently you could be horribly bigoted and get away with it. (She has since figured out this whole "love thy neighbour" thing...) C
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| KublaKhan
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland Total Likes: 207 likes
With Satan, it's always gimmie, gimmie.
| | | Re: Under the Garden City: Victoria B.C. secret tunnels. < Reply # 173 on 10/14/2005 6:58 PM > | Reply with Quote
| | | Posted by mavrix Interesting. Here are my thoughts. The whole satanic underground tunnels, do exist. But beware of venturing to deep into those tunnels. If you heard stories of rituals, human sacrificies, and so on, they probably happend at some point. Anyone interested in venturing into these with me? Ill be happy to research this more.
| Give me 48 hours notice, I'll muster my crew and we'll check it out.
| "The truth is knowable. But probably not, ever, incontrovertible." --Don DeLillo PICS |
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