The building known first as Installation Dog and later as Katy's Kitchen has served a variety of purposes over the last seven decades. Image credit: ORNL
In 1948, the government erected a funny-looking building in the woods between ORNL and the Y-12 Plant (now the Y-12 National Security Complex). Named Installation Dog, it was a concrete bunker built into the side of a hill, with a vault that would do a bank proud.
What made it look odd was the view from the outside. Installation Dog was masked with the walls and roof of a barn, and a nearby silo was in fact a machine gun nest. But while its rustic facade and tight security might have looked a little bizarre to someone on the ground, from the air it was indistinguishable from the many barns that dotted the region, and that was the point.
Installation Dog stored highly enriched uranium. This was a time when the United States was the only country in the world to have nuclear weapons, and the government needed secure, secret storage.
And it was indeed secret. Even the draftsman who designed the structure was not told what it was for. The site was patrolled day and night, and its alarm system was so sensitive that it was periodically triggered by wild animals.
Installation Dog served its intended purpose for only a year, from May 1948 to May 1949. It was kept under guard for several more years—just in case—but its days storing uranium were over.
Fortunately, the following decade brought the site a new purpose—and a new name. The purpose came from the Analytical Chemistry Division, which took over Installation Dog in the late 1950s and early ’60s and put it to work as a laboratory. The building’s new name came from the division director’s secretary, Katherine Odom, who was fond of taking her lunch there. In her honor, Installation Dog became Katy’s Kitchen, a name that has stuck, albeit informally, ever since.
Katy’s Kitchen spent its most prolific years with the Environmental Sciences Division, which occupied it from the 1970s through 2013. In the early years, the concrete bunker served as a field chemistry laboratory and storage space. In later years, a new building was constructed in front of the bunker, and the original vault door was removed for safety reasons.
One of the scientists using Katy’s Kitchen was Paul J. Hanson, now a Corporate Fellow in the Environmental Sciences Division. In a brief compiled history of the site, he notes that it supported a variety of environmental projects, including:
- Studies in the 1970s and 1980s of biogeochemistry in the Walker Branch Watershed, a small watershed east of ORNL’s main campus adjacent to Katy’s Kitchen.
- DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Monitoring Program, which in the mid-1990s used the newer building to analyze meteorological phenomena and solar radiation to get a better handle on climate change.
- The Throughfall Displacement Experiment, which ran for 15 years in the 1990s and 2000s and studied the implications of changing rainfall to the ecosystem.
- The Enriched Background Isotope Study project, which ran from the late ’90s through 2013. The study took advantage of a local rise of background radioactive carbon-14 — the isotope used for carbon dating — to study the journey of carbon through plants and soil.
Katy’s Kitchen has gone unused since the mid-2010s as ORNL’s environmental research focus moved off the Oak Ridge Reservation. But memory of the site that went from secret storage space to makeshift lunchroom to environmental laboratory lives on.
