Beneath the Hospital, a Bewildering Labyrinth

The caverns go on for miles--dim, forbidding passageways, dungeon-like rooms crammed with equipment: mazes of wires, grotesque water pumps and compressors, steam pipes and pneumatic tubes. There is no good reason to descend into these concrete catacombs beneath Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center without having some job to do, although now and then an intruder shows up anyway.

One was the jail-ward prisoner whose harebrained attempt to escape involved diving into a laundry chute--on the 13th floor. He rattled and screamed all the way down to the basement, flying out, shattering his leg and fleeing through the tunnels in memorable agony.

“Almost got away,” recalls Edward James, who has worked in the labyrinth for decades. “He was actually halfway across [the street] before the police caught him.”

More tragic was the woman who crawled into a secluded stretch of tunnel and never did find her way out. Some say she was confused--mentally ill. Others say, nah, just homeless, bedding down as any number of transients did before security got so tight, finding hidden spaces warmed by the steam pipes.

Whatever her plight, she died in that tunnel. And it was left for an employee named Charlie Green, doing routine maintenance, to chance upon the body.

“He came right out of there,” says Clarence “Pete” Hampton, who was working with Green at the time. “He was quite pale.”

Massive public institutions are often built above elaborate undergrounds, the hidden back lots where supplies are stored and trundled about, where employees tend boilers and gas lines and electrical systems. At County-USC, one of the nation’s largest acute-care hospitals and medical teaching facilities, the tunnel network is particularly vast and old--much of it dating to the 1920s, even before the 19-story main building was opened.

Two miles of pedestrian tunnels existed at one time, before the recent closures of the aging pediatric and psychiatric clinics lopped off perhaps half a mile. There are also several miles of hotter, narrower tunnels where workers with flashlights are able to replace the leaky joints of pressurized steam pipes.

Hundreds of employees toil down here--plumbers, electricians, machinists, janitors, all the blue-collar types who keep the center running. They whiz about on electric carts and “tugs” that tow heavy-wheeled bins behind them.

Tug driver Leon Thomas hauls up to five bins at a time, making stops at rancid-smelling rooms where he collects garbage. The trash tumbles down metal chutes from the hospital above, and Thomas transports it to a massive compactor down one sloping tunnel.

He has put in 20 years, but Thomas figures the yellow, dinged-up tug has been around twice that long. Everything down here is old and subject to breakdowns. When the tugs and carts stop working, they are rolled down to the repair shop and Tom Weigel fixes them.

Weigel is one of the legendary figures in the underground, partly because he can pull apart an engine in five minutes and get carts running again that no one else can get running. Also, he is blind.

Characters of every sort end up working in the tunnels. Carlos Cano, a supervisor in electrical, likes to tell tales about the ex-borax miner who was here for years, brazenly handing report cards to the bosses. He’d arrange for overtime by taking a screwdriver to the time clock and ensure job security by rigging electrical systems that only he could fix.

“Wires would start out being black, red and green, and he’d splice them, and splice them, and by the time they got to the other end they’d be brown, yellow and blue,” Cano remembers. “He was brilliant, eccentric. No fear of management, no fear of anything.”

If there is any operative word down here, that is it--eccentric. Oddities abound. The passageways dip and angle to shadowy dead ends and droning rooms piled high with esoteric machinery, arrays of pipes as impressive as stalactite formations. Near the mouth of one tunnel is a chamber containing the hospital’s vital backup generators, driven by the type of power plants you just don’t find any more in public buildings: twin Southern Pacific locomotive engines.

When they kick on, says facilities manager Patrick Brady, they generate 2,000 horsepower apiece and a noise like you wouldn’t believe: “You can feel your whole chest vibrating.”

More than a mile of pneumatic tubes run along the tunnel ceilings, carrying blood samples and lab specimens. Sometimes the tubes clog and repairmen have to cut them open.

One underground room is central headquarters for keys. Not only are there seven brands of locks in the medical center--a planning nightmare--but there are also a staggering number of keys to those locks: 157,000 different keys in all.

Active medical records fill another underground space, a room that feels as big as Carlsbad Caverns. Row upon row of metal racks contain 1 million color-coded files.

Logistical problems in such a large, antiquated facility take many forms. Much of the hospital lacks pipes for vital medical gases. So one tunnel alcove is crowded with stored canisters of oxygen and nitrous oxide.

Not a day goes by without an elevator malfunction. One or two burst pipes is a slow shift for the plumbing crew.

“You can schedule out your work before you leave [for home] and in the morning it’ll all be different, because of things that have happened during the night,” says plumbing supervisor Gale Busta. “You run across things you’ve never seen before.”

Sometimes those things become part of tunnel lore. Years ago, a doctor studying poisonous spiders and snakes would get occasional donations from tunnel workers who had captured black widows. One day, however, a snakeskin blew out of the trash and ended up near the tunnels.

It created a scare that lasted weeks, as Pete Hampton remembers. Guys went crazy imagining snakes down those long, dark tunnels.

“People would go in there,” Hampton says, “and they’d have floodlights, practically.”