The Diefenbunker
I’m standing in a bleak landscape in a mostly abandoned military base outside of Debert, wondering if I’m in the right place for my interview with the mysterious Anton Self. Down the road, a few camouflaged soldiers lounge beside a camouflaged truck.
A door creaks open in the grassy hill behind me. A grey-bearded, paint-flecked man approaches.
“Jon?” he asks.
I confirm my identity.
“Come inside. Anton is waiting for you,” he says, heading back into the mound.
I follow.
What choice do I have?
We pass down a dank tunnel, slip behind a blast wall, and stop at the outer office of the buried fortress. I’d long heard rumours about the legendary Diefenbunkers, built across the country by prime minister John Diefenbaker to house the leaders of Canada after an atomic strike, but they seemed too fabulous to be real. Debert’s not the end of the world, but it’s not a bad place to be when the world ends.
My guide’s name in Tony Publicover. He’s an artist Anton hired to update the Cold War bomb shelter; he envisions modern, but with a military look. It was built in 1962 and stocked with enough food and fuel to keep a flame of humanity alive for six long, post-apocalyptic months, while civilization died outside. A governing elite of 350 would have gathered here after a nuclear strike on Halifax. It’s built for survival, not to look good.
Anton wants it to look good.
Tony hands me over to Pam Patterson, chief of security. Lights blink on a vast, Dr. Strangelove control panel in her office. She instructs me to follow her: Anton is in the lower level.
She grabs a flashlight and we head into the bowels of the bomb shelter, walking down long, dark corridors lined with air-tight vaults. The air is cool and smells cryptic. There are hundreds of bedrooms on either side. All of the signs are original 1960s: stenciled or handwritten.
Pam was living in Ottawa, but eager to move east. She saw a story about Anton on the internet and got in touch. He hired her to run the bunker at first, and eventually she’ll oversee the execution of Anton’s plan. She shows me a storage room full of manuals and maintenance records dating back 50 years. It’s in this concrete room that she learned how to operate the complex machine that is the bunker.
We pass through a tight room with a showerhead. This is one of three entry points to the bunker. Anyone coming in after the attack would’ve first suffered through a scrub-down shower.
Pam leads me down a tiny spiral staircase into a vast room of huge machines roaring and whirling away in the darkness. They’re 50-year-old generators, built to run non-stop for six months. The building should last 500 years and the way the engines are humming, it sounds like they’ll be here to the end.
Down one murky corridor, we find a monstrous paper shredder that would ignite Stephen King’s imagination for years. A huge incinerator sits outside.
This place eats its secrets.
Pam leads me into a big room lit by harsh fluorescent tubes. Giant topographical maps of Nova Scotia line the wall.
Before me is Anton Ebersberg Self, smoking a cigar. He’s handsome, his hair combed back and his beard trimmed. He’s wearing a tailored jacket, jeans and expensive shoes.
“Welcome to Dataville,” he grins, offering me his hand.
Anton is the CEO of Bastionhost; he bought the decommissioned nuclear bunker this year to turn it into a “revolutionary,” super-secure web host and data storage centre. Born in Martha’s Vineyard, he left looking for a place that combined that charm with New York City’s modernity, plus he wanted a great coast line. He fell in love with Nova Scotia and moved to McNab’s Island, the legal headquarters of Bastionhost.
He calls Dataville “one of the safest places in the world” and plans to have the bunker fully operational by Christmas.
“When you’re doing online banking, if you’re doing searches, uploading photos, booking online tickets, all those functions are served by computer servers that live in buildings like this,” explains Self, who founded the New York data communications infrastructure company Telephant in the 1990s. Dataville’s also about powering the network: “When you click your mouse, there are a whole bunch of machines somewhere processing your request.”
Those machines have to be kept safe: where’s safer than a bomb shelter in Nova Scotia?
“I had a Eureka moment and thought, ‘What a great place to have a system of data centres to serve both New York and London from a place that’s actually in between New York and London,’” Anton explains. “We’re creating a carrier-neutral facility. It’s a UN of carriers.”
Seeing as he owns a nuclear bunker and lives on a deserted island, I ask if he has a Bond villain nickname. He considers that for a moment. “I think having a name like Anton Self is probably weird enough,” he decides.
First published in the Chronicle-Herald July 5, 2009