Fact or Fiction: NAI’s Underground Tunnels
Is it true that there is a tunnel beneath the school? NAEye investigates.
Rumour has it there is a tunnel connecting a part of North Allegheny Intermediate High School to Carson Middle School. It has long been a rumour ever since Carson Middle School was founded in 1974. The rumour is false.
However, the rumour is false not because of the tunnel itself. It is wrong due to false location. There is a tunnel that connects North Allegheny Intermediate High School to McKnight Elementary School.
The tunnel, or accessway as Mr. Hiery described it, runs parallel to Tiger Hall, the main hallway in NAI, connecting every other hall within the school.
Mr. Heiry explained it as around a four foot wide, six foot high accessway with a floor made of gravel and brick walls. The accessway is about six foot underground where nobody can access it by just digging up the NAI field no matter how hard one tries.
There are no known lights that can be found throughout the accessway. Therefore, whoever travels through the accessway is advised to use flashlights or use extreme caution or else find yourself walking into pipes or items you won’t be able to identify.
Pipes travel throughout the accessway carrying air for the vents and waste from the bathroom toilets. They travel along the walls of accessway and even at some points in the middle of the walkway, making the remaining part of the walkway around two foot wide.
But that’s not the only one. There are a total of seven accessways however only one travels to McKnight Elementary. The remaining six travel only beneath the building of NAI but they also have pipes and wires.
Only maintenance, IT and Mr. Heiry himself have access to the accessways, however his staff does not. IT had to use the accessway over the summer of 2019 in order to install new cable lines which sped up WiFi communications and access.
All of the tunnels are accessible from NAI’s building but in order to keep up the security on the tunnel, NAEye is unable to reveal which way they use to get to the tunnel. However, NAEye was able to learn that there are many access points to get to the tunnels including ones that are in the floors and even one that is buried beneath NAI’s floor.
All access points need a key to open the latch that leads to certain tunnels. That key is locked up at a location that will not be shared for security and safety reasons.
Although the accessways beneath NAI may not be the Indiana Jones inspired action setting that we first believed it to be, these tunnels are still vital for NAI and McKnight Elementary. No matter how vital they are, students and teachers have never seen them and will never see them.
Anthony Durzo is a sophomore at North Allegheny Intermediate High School and this second year as a staff writer for NAI's student online newspaper, NAEye....
Andrew Hickerson • Feb 1, 2020 at 10:00 pm
LIES LIES ALL LIES! I know treasure lies in those tunnels! This article is just to try and throw treasure hunters off the scent! Heard it’s almost as big as the treasure of the Sierra Madre(Got that fact from my Uncle Sammy)! Golden unicycles, golden toilet paper, golden harmonicas, everything one could need to live life in luxury. Might even find the Declaration of Independence or even all the socks i’m missing might lie there. All locked away in the winding tunnels of NAI. Once I find it i’ll be so rich I can buy all of Texas, leadership positions in foreign countries, or even pay for college with all of it if i’m lucky. Watch out NAI, for i’m gonna be coming to school on a golden unicycle with socks that actually match.
Seys • Jan 30, 2020 at 4:52 pm
Could the tunnels be used in an emergency evacuation situation, like a lock down?
Anthony Durzo • Feb 3, 2020 at 2:11 pm
Because of the very small size of the accessways, there is no possibility of a large group of students to hide in there. Mr. Heiry said it would be a struggle for two people to go down there for even a tour. While it may seem ideal to hide down there due to a lack of knowledge about them from people outside of the school, it may be the least safest place in the school in an emergency evacuation situation because there are no lights and it would be very hard to escape if students had to get out in a hurry.