| For Sale On eBay: Titan
1 Missile Site In Washington
 California
real estate man says he's got a great deal for buyers in Eastern
Washington.
Bari Hotchkiss bought a Titan 1 missile site some five
years ago. Now he's got it on the market for $3.95 million.
It's in Batum, a small wheat farming community between
Moses Lake and Ritzville.
You just don't expect to find anything monumental in Adams
County.
But Hotchkiss says this site "is
sort of like the Washington monument or the pyramids
of Egypt."
To see his monument, you needed
to don a hard hat. As Hotchkiss says "We don't want anybody bumping their
head on a piece of steel." He'll also hand you a flashlight.
Once inside, you go down, and down, and down. Five flights
down.
Suddenly, tunnels snake every which
way. "One goes
to the missile silos and other buildings and this is the
control building straight ahead here," he explained.
Avoiding big gaps in the floor and ignoring grafitti,
he took KOMO 4 News to the spot where cold war warriors
could have fired Titan nuclear missiles.
"Push a button and there they go. No way to call
them back," he said.
We asked him 'what can you do with
something like this?' Hotchkiss replied, "Well this
would make awesome wine cellars!"
The purchase price includes three, 155 foot high missile
silos.
"Use your imagination. Can
you imagine an indoor, underground 155 foot rock climbing
room?"
Another suggestion: "The first
tunnel level would give us a 90-foot deep scuba tank
that we could fill with
water and teach people to scuba dive."
He is most proud of the former power generator room. He
promises with a back hoe and $1 million, it could be transformed
into a subterranean gymnasium.
Hotchkiss says a lease could be
cheap. "If it's something
cool, one of kind never be replaced on earth, I'll give
you some awesome terms. If you want to grow mushrooms the
the price would be so high you wouldn't want to grow mushrooms."
The more we walked, the less Bari
wanted to sell. "I'd
really rather not sell it, I'd rather just lease it." Apparently
tunnels grow on you.
The property is listed on eBay realty. The site has had
250,000 visitors. Hotchkiss won't say what offers, if any,
he's considering.
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