THREE RIVERS AREA — With a boyish smile, Troy Barley hiked up a small hill on his 5-acre plot. This isn’t an ordinary piece of property, which was evident when he got to the top of the hill and said, “This is the middle of the silo.”
Barley’s land is the site of a former Titan II missile base, and he is planning on making an underground home in a section of the subterranean construction, which he said was filled with about 500,000 gallons of ground water, 400,000 less than a week before.
Climbing down a ladder, Barley, a Cabot native, pointed out a blast door that gives him access into the 4,000-square-foot section of structure that housed the launch-control center.
During the Cold War, the United States built sites in Arkansas, Arizona and Kansas to house Titan II missiles, which were armed with nuclear warheads. The Titan II missiles were decommissioned in 1982, after 20 years of service.
Although these missile silos are hidden underground, and some of them have been partially demolished, a few of them are being re-purposed, and Barley’s is one of them.
Barley, who is a nurse on the open-heart surgery team at Springhill Medical Center in North Little Rock, said he has been helping a friend re-purpose a missile silo in Vilonia into a home. When some property came on the market in White County, Barley said he bought it with the intention of using part of the complex on his property for living quarters.
“They are super-well-built of U.S. steel, and the walls are 4 feet thick - they aren’t going anywhere,” Barley said.
He began working on his project about nine months ago and said it would take him about a year to have it to a point where he can move in.
Because he is doing most of the work himself when he’s not on duty at the hospital, he said, it will take him a lot longer than if he were working on the project full time.
His main focus right now is water management. But his long-term vision is to build a two-car garage and a 1,000-square-foot house on top of the underground section of the silo that he is renovating. The underground section maintains a constant temperature of around 58 degrees, Barley said.
“I think it would make one excellent home. … I always wanted to build an underground house,” he said. “They are built to survive anything but a direct nuclear attack.”
He then added, with a smile, “You don’t get a better man cave.”
Although when he was a child, a tornado that blew through Cabot in 1976 destroyed the family home, Barley said that didn’t have an impact on his decision to build down instead of up.
“Since I was a kid, I wanted an underground home,” he said. “There’s a lot of security in it.”
He also explained that he always liked the way the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings movies lived in little hillside homes.
His construction project has turned into his main hobby.
“I don’t hunt,” he said, then smiled and gazed across his property, “I own a missile silo.”
Barley said that back in the mid-’60s when the missile silos were built, each one cost about $11 million to construct.
“Nowadays, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build this, and that’s with no equipment,” he said. “I’ve got to clean it up, but I got it for less than $40,000.”
There are 18 Titan II missile sites in Arkansas, and Barley said he’s seen 16 of them.
To learn more about the missile program and the sites, visit the Titan Missile Museum website at titanmissilemuseum.org.
Staff writer Jeanni Brosius can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or jbrosius@arkansasonline.com.
Three Rivers, Pages 117 on 02/26/2012