‘A dangerous place to be’: After rescue, missile silo owner hopes people stay away

DEER TRAIL, Colo. (KDVR) — The Colorado property owner where several teens were rescued from an abandoned missile silo spoke about his concerns in an exclusive interview with FOX31.

Although a fence is broken, the property owner has gated off the area and placed locks and no trespassing signs, but despite those efforts, people still find their way beyond the gate.

“This is real dangerous. This is a dangerous place to be,” Jerry Linnebur said at his property near Deer Trail.

A message spraypainted on the silo reads “Welcome to Paradise,” but after an intense rescue from this silo around 3:30 a.m. Sunday, it was anything but.

“If you want to know what black is, down there, that’s as black as it gets down there. It’s pitch dark,” he said.

Crews were underground for several hours searching through the silo described as tunnels and caverns. Linnebur told FOX31 he has not been down there in nearly a decade.

“Well, I don’t know what the condition of it there is now, but back then was water in it. There’s steel, it’s tunnels, it’s a mess — let’s just put it that way,” Linnebur said. “Like some of it, you’re walking on a beam just so wide, and like that generator room underneath that mound of dirt right there, it’s big enough it’s like a gym down there. Like a gymnasium. It’s a big room.”

After nearly two hours, rescuers made contact with the three teens trapped inside, including one who had serious injuries from falling 30 feet.

“He fell through three stories where there was an opening. It will send you through all three stories. There’s several rooms in certain depths,” Linnebur said.

‘I hope it’s a lesson to the other kids’

The first thing that went through his mind when he learned of what happened: “the condition of that boy or that young fella,” Linnebur said. “Well, I always worry about people getting hurt here. I was hoping he was alive. I hate the idea that he’s — that he could be crippled for life.”

Linnebur said the silo was closed off by steel bars that were removed by first responders to make the rescue.

“If your flashlight went out or something happened, you can step off. If you step off from one of those silos, now they’re a lot of those have a lot of water and they’re pretty full with water,” he said.

For now, he said he will do all he can to keep people away.

“A lot of times the deputies will come up here just to make sure, look and make sure there’s no cars setting up here. There’s a deputy who lives in that house right there that works for Arapahoe County. He wasn’t on duty that day. Matter of fact, he’s the one that told me about this,” Linnebur said.

He wants other kids to learn from this mistake.

“I hope it’s a lesson to the other kids that were in here and that they tell their other friends around the schools, stuff like that, to stay away from there. Because it’s dangerous. You can see what happened,” Linnebur said.

What were Colorado’s missile silos for?

This is the first time Tracie White, with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, has heard of a situation like this.

“I do know that trespassing has been an issue on many of these facilities. At this point, I know many of the property owners typically do press charges on trespassers on facilities such as this on private property. However I have not heard of any instances involving an injury of this nature,” she said.

She explains what silos are.

“The Titan I missiles are one of the first intercontinental ballistic missiles developed by the United States. There are six of these missile complexes in Colorado. Each of these type missile complexes contained three missile launch silos, a bunch of associated equipment, propellant terminals, a powerhouse, a control center, antennas and a number of underground tunnel systems that connected the infrastructure,” White said.

She said the department has little involvement in closing the silos.

“So we really don’t have any involvement in those pieces. We were involved in the environmental cleanup of these sites but not so much any of the property transfer issues or closure,” White said.

Linnebur said he plans to put concrete slabs to cover the silo to prevent something like this from happening in the future.

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