THE WHITE HOUSE
November 10, 2008
1, The White House Complex includes the following:
The White House is made up of 6 stories. The Ground Floor, the State Floor, and Third Floor and a two story basement.
In 1948 Truman commissioned a reconstruction. It required the complete dismantling of the interior spaces, construction of a new load-bearing internal steel frame and the reconstruction of the original rooms within the new structure. Some modifications to the floor plan were made, the largest being the repositioning of the grand staircase to open into the Entrance Hall, rather than the Cross Hall. Central air conditioning was added, as well as two additional sub-basements providing space for workrooms, storage, and a bomb shelter.
Whitehouse layout:
Today the group of buildings housing the presidency is known as the White House Complex. It includes the central Executive Residence flanked by the East Wing and West Wing. Day to day household operations are coordinated by the Chief Usher. The White House includes: six stories and 55,000 ft² (5,100 m²) of floor space, 132 rooms and 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, twenty-eight fireplaces, eight staircases, three elevators, five full-time chefs, a tennis court, a (single-lane) bowling alley, a movie theater, a jogging track, a swimming pool, and a putting green. It receives about 5,000 visitors a day.
Executive Residence:
The original residence is in the center. Two colonnades — one on the east and one on the west — designed by Jefferson, now serve to connect the East and West Wings, added later. The Executive Residence houses the president's home, as well as rooms for ceremonies and official entertaining. The State Floor of the residence building includes the East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, State Dining Room, Family Dining Room, Cross Hall, Entrance Hall, and Grand Staircase. The Ground Floor is made up of the Diplomatic Reception Room, Map Room, China Room, Vermeil Room, Library, the main kitchen, and other offices.[33] The second floor family residence includes the Yellow Oval Room, East and West Sitting Halls, the White House Master Bedroom, President's Dining Room, the Treaty Room, Lincoln Bedroom and Queens' Bedroom, as well as two additional bedrooms, a smaller kitchen, and a private dressing room. The third floor consists of the White House Solarium, Game Room, Linen Room, a Diet Kitchen, and another sitting room (currently President George W. Bush's workout room).
West Wing:
The West Wing houses the President's office (the Oval Office) and offices of his senior staff, with room for about 50 employees. It also includes the Cabinet Room, where the president conducts business meetings and where the United States Cabinet meets, as well as the White House Situation Room, James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, and Roosevelt Room. Some members of the President's staff are located in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building, formerly the State War and Navy building, and sometimes known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
This portion of the building was used as the setting for the popular television show The West Wing.
East Wing:
The East Wing, which contains additional office space, was added to the White House in 1942. Among its uses, the East Wing has intermittently housed the offices and staff of the First Lady, and the White House Social Office. Rosalynn Carter, in 1977, was the first to place her personal office in the East Wing and to formally call it the "Office of the First Lady." The East Wing was built during World War II in order to hide the construction of an underground bunker to be used in emergency situations. The bunker has come to be known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.
2. Presidential Emergency Operations Center:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Emergency_Operations_Center
The Presidential Emergency Operations Center is under the East Wing of the White House. It is designed to withstand a nuclear blast, although the President would more likely be evacutated. It is not the same as the Situation Room, which is on the ground floor of the West Wing. It does contain several televisions, phones and communications systems to coordinate with other government entities during an emergency. During a breach of White House security, to include P-56 airspace violators, the President and other protectees will be relocated to the executive briefing room, next to the PEOC. Day to day, the PEOC is manned around the clock by joint service military officers and NCOs.
3. WIRED: Does the White House Have Secret Laser Defense:
There are all kinds of stories about how the White House is defended. One urban legend says Stinger anti-aircraft missiles are supposedly perched on the roof. According this 1998 report by Human Rights Watch, Pennsylvania Avenue may be protected by a laser weapon, meant to ward off 9/11-style suicide attacks.
Lasers originally developed for dazzling and blinding missions are being offered to law enforcement agencies and potentially for commercial sale. In one notable example, a California-based company, Light Solutions, is reportedly developing a dazzling counter-terrorism "green laser" for the Army on behalf of the U.S. Secret Service. A secret "black" program, this laser is intended to defend the White House and other government buildings in Washington from someone who might employ a light plane or helicopter in an attack.
The "green laser" described was developed in conjunction with Darpa and the Air Force's Phillips Laboratory (now part of the Air Force Research Lab). The latest version is the Compact High Power (CHP) Laser Dazzler, described as a 500 Milliwatt, 532nm Green Flashing Laser. As with the WWII dazzling strobelights, the flashing is said to increase effectiveness and produce disorientation in the target. It is effective out to a one-mile range, and has been urgently requested in Iraq as an alternative to lethal means of stopping drivers approaching checkpoints.
We do not know whether the Secret Service had such lasers to protect the White House on 9/11 -- or if they have them now. Beyond the 1998 report, there's not much evidence. But we do know that in 2001 the makers were touting a bigger version of their Dazzler to the Navy. It was ten times as powerful as the handheld model, and was suitable for use on ships and other in "area defense" situations.
The British had already used a similar weapon, the Laser Dazzle Sight, during the Falkands/Malvinas conflict of 1982. Mounted on Royal Navy frigates, it is reported to have had limited effectiveness against attacking Argentine A4 Skyhawk pilots. The LDS was apparently withdrawn after the 1995 Protocol banning laser blinding weapons.
How effective would it be? Even at five hundred miles an hour, a plane would take seven seconds to traverse the final mile to its target. Assuming the aircraft was picked up and targeted before then, the operator with a high-power dazzler should be able to get an effect more than a mile out. At that speed and over that time, a blind pilot would have a great deal of difficulty striking a particular building. A crashing aircraft is however going to cause a lot of damage anywhere in an urban area.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service is apparently still interested in the cutting edge of strobing dazzle weapons -- at least the hand-held, anti-personnel models.
UPDATE: Since 2005, any unauthorized or unidentified aircraft approaching the Air
Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in Washington DC has been targeted by the laser beams of the Visual Warning System. This shines an alternating red and green laser beam, "designed to provide a clear warning." This is a Class 1 laser which will not dazzle or blind. The VWS is described as being "part of the overall layered defense of our nation’s capitol." Since any potential threat aircraft is clearly being tracked by a laser, it would only take the flick of a switch to engage the sort of protective dazzler described above. Given the minimal extra cost, it would seem crazy for VWS not to be part of a dazzling defense.
UPDATE 2: "I can’t tell a Stinger [missile] from a Bonobo monkey, but there is a missile battery-type apparatus on the roof of one of the nearby office buildings," a friend of Danger Room writes. "It’s visible from points slightly south of the WH itself. It was put up there after September 11, 2001."
4. EXCERPT FROM CHAPER 3: STANDING NEX TO HISTORY by Joseph Petro, special agent in he Scret Service for 27 years.
http://books.google.com/books?id=MQ6tLFABLp4C&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=secrets+of+the+white+house+building&source=web&ots=Via1WGYEPq&sig=l8sgq_7yEs93p3xFBhrwTJF-gjQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPA49,M1
“If someone tries to go over the fence bells and whistles go off everywhere and the UD respond (Uniform Division). Depending on where the President is the Secret Service in the White House-being the inner perimeter-might move in on him a little closer but there’s no chance he’ll get near the building…
And even if someone gets inside, which he couldn’t, he’d never get inside all the doors and windows are locked. And even if someone gets inside, which he couldn’t, he could never get into the Oval Office, because those doors are also always locked. What’s more, none of the 3 doors open like regular doors. There’s a trick to it. That also applies to doors on the limousine. They don’t work like regular car doors and unless you kno how to open them they simply won’t open. Anyway there are always so many people close to the Presidents that getting close to the President isn’t something that’s going to happen.
Even so there are contingency plans for everything, even the impossible. The President is briefed on what to expect and knows where he will be taken.
There are two operational command posts at the White House. The UD runs a big, hi-tech command post. That’s where they have all the alarms and security cameras. The Secret Service Command Post is officially called W-16 but codenamed “Horsepower” and it’s on the ground floor on the West Wing. It’s a rectangular office that runs along the wall on the south side, partially under the Cabinet Room and partially under the Oval Office.
The doctor’s office, which is really just an examining room, is on the ground floor of the residence, next to the map room. They can do any major procedures there…The photograpapher’s office is down the hall from W-16, next to the barber shop. There’s one chair for the President.
For the record there is a little known 3rd command post. It’s a tiny room on he ground floor of the residence, right behind the elevator on the north side of the hallway across from the Diplomatic Reception Room. Normally it is used by the first lady’s detail, but when the President is upstairs in the residence, the night shift moves over there. It’s code name is Staircase.
5. The New York Times: Overhaul Moves White House Data Center Into Modern Era:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/washington/19bush.html?_r=1&em&ex=1166763600&en=e7ee482e06f833ce&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin
December 19, 2006
Overhaul Moves White House Data Center Into Modern Era
By JIM RUTENBERG and DAVID E. SANGER
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — Perhaps no corner of the White House has starred in more movies and television shows than the Situation Room, the presidential decision center under the West Wing that Hollywood imagines as a high-tech beehive of activity, where presidents command covert operations around the world.
In reality, it was something of a low-tech dungeon.
Until it closed for its biggest overhaul since John F. Kennedy settled into its wood-paneled conference room, most of the room’s monitors used — get this — picture tubes. Communications were often by fax. The computers and telephones looked like the best technology available, in 1985. There was a small kitchen, but it had no sink.
On Dec. 27 the new Situation Room is to open formally, the result of planning that reaches back to before the Sept. 11 attacks but took on added urgency afterward. The White House offered a preview to two reporters on Monday, days before its new data center is pumped full of classified information and its doors are sealed to outsiders.
Even in its new incarnation, it is not quite up to the standards of “24.” But it is getting closer. For starters, Mr. Bush’s new main conference room, just underneath the main floor of the West Wing, has six flat-screen televisions for secure video conferences, and the technology linking them to generals and prime ministers around the globe makes it less likely that the encrypted voices and images will go black. (That happened regularly in connections to Baghdad, an event one former administration official said had been known to “prompt a presidential outburst.”)
The screens also have what Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, described in a tour as “John Madden telestrators,” the ability to perform on-screen drawings.
(White House technologists settled on NEC plasma flat-screens for the president’s main conference room and LCD screens, made by LG, in the remainder of the chamber.)
The watch officers, who were previously seated so they stared at walls rather than each other, are now arrayed on two tiers of curved computer terminals that can be fed both classified and unclassified data from around the country and the world. That ends a problem that most multi-national companies solved years ago, an inability to merge different kinds of data without effectively having to cut and paste.
While Secret Service officers always confiscated cellular phones and two-way pagers that could serve as bugging devices, the new situation room leaves nothing to chance: It has sensors embedded in the ceilings that pick up cellular signals and alert the guards.
And the space, once chopped up into little cubicles with low ceilings, now has “flow,” the result of a design expert who helped deliver some metaphorical feng shui and fabric-covered walls, though officials in a White House that famously eschews anything that can be described as touchy-feely declined to use the term themselves.
The Situation Room was largely an outgrowth of the Cuban missile crisis, an event that made President Kennedy and his aides realize that they needed a central hub for information during crises.
Since then, it has been the site of critical decisions: Lyndon Johnson spent long nights picking bombing targets there; Bill Clinton used it to handle Bosnia and the Asian financial crisis. Over the years, the technology became a patchwork of fixes, as Wang word processors were replaced by personal computers, and then for portable secure video. The 9/11 commission found that on the day of the 2001 attacks, communications frayed, making it hard for Mr. Bush, flying around on Air Force One, to get a picture of what was going on.
Mr. Hagin, a trusted aide who handles much of the behind-the-scenes work of the White House, said officials decided a complete overhaul was desperately needed almost as soon as they saw it.
“We were all underwhelmed the first time we walked into the Situation Room,” he said in an interview at the White House on Monday, an assessment shared by others, including Phil Lago, the executive secretary of the security council who planned the renovation..
“It never looked like it was supposed to – like the movies,” said Mr. Lago.But, Mr. Hagin said, after the Sept. 11 attacks the project took on added importance, as officials came to realize that the room, created in the cold war, was not set up to gather both international and domestic information.
“It was for foreign intelligence, national security, for a lot of years – since it’s inception,” Mr. Hagin said. Hurricane Katrina exposed its limitations in linking up with information from state and local governments in a timely fashion.
Among the most important changes, Mr. Hagin said, was the expansion of its use beyond the National Security Council to also include the Homeland Security Council and the White House chief of staff’s office.
Officials found the old room’s wood-paneled walls too noisy, making it hard to hear for those listening in via video or telephone. The new room has less mahogany and more of what Mr. Hagin described as 21st century whisper wall.
And, where the old Situation Room suite had only two secure video rooms, the new one has five and a direct, secure feed to Air Force One, a better fit for Mr. Bush personally.
“This president wants to look you in the eye while you’re answering his questions,” Mr. Lago said
Though years in the planning, the renovation took about four and a half months, a disruptive process that has most affected the White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, whose office sits directly above where most of the work has taken place. Staff members described sitting in his room and hearing ear-piercing noise or watching water ripple in glasses on his desk as the floor shook.
During the renovation, he and Mr. Lago said, workers unearthed several relics of the storied chamber’s past – from coaxial cables to columns and a frame window left over from an old sunken courtyard that was built by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and later covered by new construction.
At times, Mr. Hagin said, “The noise was unbearable.”
Mr. Hagin said the room was devised for easy technological upgrades, which will now happen more regularly under a new budgetary process, so the White House does not have to undergo such disruption again. “It’s designed so you don’t have to carve a hole in an antique mahogany wall to improve it.”
Mr. Hagin has taken on the rebuilding of the room as something of a legacy project for future presidents. “We’ve learned an awful lot of lessons about how to proceed and how to generate information and we’re taking advantage of those lessons while we can still make a contribution,” he said. “We’re going to leave a real gem for the future.
Correction: December 21, 2006
A picture on Tuesday of the White House Situation Room before the room was remodeled carried an erroneous agency affiliation for the photographer, Eric Draper. He is with the White House, not Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
White House Situation Room, get’s a makeover:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19336171.htm
WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Deep inside the West Wing, across from the take-out window for the White House cafeteria is a dark-paneled door that only the truly secure can enter.
It opens into the Situation Room, where presidents plan wars, run top-secret operations and brainstorm crises at home and abroad.
The basement hideaway was created during President John Kennedy's administration to gather and coordinate real-time information.
The Situation Room is constantly staffed by duty officers who monitor world events and keep senior White House staff up to date.
Reporters were given a rare tour of the secure site in the White House, under renovation since August and due to open around the turn of the year.
The cost is classified, like the information that flows through the offices. "It's ahead of schedule and under budget," said Joe Hagin, deputy White House chief of staff.
In the renovated space, duty officers will receive intelligence reports on three-screen computers at curved stations next to the "surge" room where officials can gather quickly to review breaking security incidents.
The president's main conference room has six flat wall video screens, microphones and speakers set unobtrusively in the ceiling and a long wooden table where he can conduct secure videoconferences with world leaders and talk with his national security team.
Classified communications can come and go, including to Air Force One when the president travels.
Across from the reception desk are two cylindrical booths with curved glass doors to house secure telephones yet to be installed.
"We literally took it down to the bare bricks and the dirt floor," Hagin said.
White House staff have had to deal with the inconveniences of the renovation that is right under White House chief of staff Josh Bolten's office.
Nothing historic was lost and the old conference room was dismantled "piece-by-piece" and archived, Hagin said.
Outside the door, a couple of young White House staffers await their orders at the take-out window as a cart loaded with lettuce passes by a glass-cased model of the U.S. Navy frigate USS Constitution, launched in 1798 and still in service.
5. White House Air Conditioning: Carrier:
http://www.corp.carrier.com/vgn-ext-templating/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=382176dfe8708010VgnVCM100000cb890b80RCRD&cpsextcurrchannel=1
In 1930, the West Wing of the White House was reconstructed due to the extensive damage of a Christmas Eve fire in 1929. The reconstruction included a central air conditioning system installed by Carrier. The Executive Office Building and the Department of Commerce also received air conditioning systems that year. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his staff experienced their first warm season at the White House in 1933, air conditioning units were added to the private quarters on the second floor, to no doubt ease the pain of the polio-stricken Commander-in-Chief.
In 1998, Carrier caught the attention of the executive office yet again. President Clinton was the featured speaker at a groundbreaking ceremony in San Fernando, Calif. to introduce a new residential community, WestSide Village. The homes of the community feature innovative, advanced systems that meet the criteria for the "next generation of American homes," as defined by The Partnership for Advanced Technologies in Housing (PATH). Carrier's non-ozone-depleting WeatherMaker™ with Puron® central air conditioner was the only HVAC system represented.
Practically 70 years after air conditioning Roosevelt's White House, Carrier is still helping to keep U.S. presidents cool. In the fall of 2000, the Clinton administration requested Carrier's help. President Clinton was scheduled to make a historic trip to Vietnam in November, and although officials assumed most of the venues visited would be air conditioned, this was not the case! Carrier Vietnam stepped in and provided 30 Slim Pac Units to be used at various stops throughout the trip.
6. Plumbing and Electricity:
http://www.theplumber.com/white.html
After the reconstruction,(1948-1952) the mechanical area was enlarged to 160,000 cubic feet and included a transformer room, an electrical repair shop, a carpenter shop, and compressor rooms for the air-conditioning system. In the basement are storage rooms, laundry, engineers' offices, dentist's office, control room, water softener, men's and women's locker rooms and lavatories, incinerator and elevator machinery.
While the exterior and much of the interior of the White House was constructed of materials which are expected to last for 300 years, the plumbing fixtures were installed with the idea that they could be replaced without major reconstruction in about 20 years. This was on the theory that the plumbing fixtures are constantly being improved in appearance and mechanical operation.
The plumbing fixtures are of high-quality standard construction. Because all piping above the basement is concealed in places where its renewal would be difficult and expensive durable brass pipe was used to minimize the necessity for repairs. All hot and cold water lines are red brass while the heating, vent and waste lines are brass and copper tube.
The hardware is solid brass and bronze. Since there were "objections to flushing valve water closets due to noise in flushing," low noise flushing valve outfits were installed. Drainage piping below the basement floor is extra-heavy cast iron.
Lavatories are of vitreous china with combination supply fixtures. Those on the second floor are fitted with drinking water faucets combined with the supply fixtures. Showers are provided in the bathrooms on the second and third floors. The second floor showers are in separate enclosures; those on the third floor are over the bathtubs. Each shower fixture is fitted with an automatic water temperature regulator.
The bathrooms were fitted with shower cabinets as well as bathtubs. The shower cabinets have glass doors as well as bathtubs. Before the renovation, no connected with the guest rooms, and overnight visitors had to walk across a hall. Now all guest rooms have adjoining baths and separate baths have been provided for the servants.
Andrew Tully described the Truman bathroom in the May 1952 issue of The Plumbing News: "If they offered me any room in the house, I'd take Mr. Truman's bathroom. In the first place, it's big-a spacious grotto of cool, gleaming, green and white tile, where a guy could set up housekeeping if things get tough. Then there are the fixtures all white ... and a tribute to 20th century plumbing. Take the bathtub, for instance. None of those squat little bushel-basket-like jobs you see in some modem homes. Our President's tub is a good seven feet long - the kind in which a man can stretch out in when he comes home from the office, all tired out from working over a hot Republican."
"A good seven or eight feet away on the opposite wall is the widest wash basin I ever saw. My four kids could all wash their hands there and never rub elbows. In the middle of the two water faucets is a third tap - for ice water. Of course, there's a shower stall with a glass door. This is a couple blocks across the room in another direction. All around the room are little sets of tile shelves."
7. Presidential Tunnel:
http://cryptome.info/0001/prez-tunnel.htm
Here are unclassified mentions of the Presidential Subway that runs under/near Rt 7 to Berryville/Winchester and connects via the Rt 11/Rt 81 access points with numerous facilities at Front Royal, Summit Point, Bluemont, Quirauk Mt, Blue Ridge, Sites W/R/D/S/C/E, and the other 107 relocation and C3I sites in the area with the situation room at the White House and the Site P/NMCC command center just off the Yellow line ext to the Potomac.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42754-2002Jan26.html
The tunnel connects near the White House evacuation platform, and transits a point within just a few hundred feet of here where it cross underneath the Yellow line before the slow climb to Bluemont to the West. The proximity of this project to the Metro Yellow line and the Presidential line could just be a coincidence.
8. Photo: White House Compressor Room During Renovation:
http://trumanlibrary.org/photographs/displayimage.php?pointer=19016&people=&listid=0
9. Photo: White house Bowling Alley:
http://www.obamacantbowl.net/2008/06/welcome-and-so-what.html
10. Photos: The Brady Briefing Room:
http://blogs.chron.com/whitehouse/archives/2006/08/ciao_to_the_bra_1.html
Built over the the old White House pool in the basement.
11. Photos: White House Situation Room:
http://www.pimall.com/nais/whitehousesitroom.html
12. West Wing Floorplan:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/images/west_wing.gif
13. West Wing Ground Floorplan:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/images/west_wing_gf.gif
14. Situation Room Floorplan:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/images/sitroom.gif
15. Photos: White House Pool:
http://www.pools4you.50megs.com/polictical_pools.htm
Original pool covered by Nixon. Outdoor pool installed by Ford.
“The pool is still intact, it just lays empty, below the Press Room.”
(http://www.ogleearth.com/2006/01/yes_we_have_no.html)
