"It's kind of like a cool steam bath," says Harry A. Hawkes, director for engineering and utilities, who oversees the tunnels' operation most directly.

Excess heat in the tunnels is vented out through above-ground vents "mushrooms" to tunnel workers-of which the most visible is located next to a path outside Canaday Hall.

However, on some occasions the tunnels can still be dangerous. Last Monday, a steam pipe-gasket leak in the Yard flooded the tunnels in that area with steam and short-circuited the lights, leaving tunnels from the Science Center to Widener Library completely blacked out.

"It's not so hot [that] it's uninhabitable, and the tunnels are well-ventilated," Hawkes says, but adds, "absolutely we send people down there in pairs."

Underground Round

Another tunnel system was built around the same time that the steam tunnels were extended, linking a central kitchen under Eliot House with smaller "finishing kitchens" in Eliot, Kirkland, Lowell, Winthrop and Leverett houses.

Running parallel to a steam tunnel spur for most of its length, the dining-services tunnel is about eight feet high and 15 feet wide.

According to Robert J. Leandro, assistant director of house dining, traffic in this tunnel starts about 6 a.m. Food and other supplies are packed onto the long beds of the electric carts, or into warming and cooling trailers, and then trucked off to House kitchens for breakfast service.

"They start delivery at 6 [a.m.], and don't stop until dinner, because every bit of trash has to come back to the central kitchen," Leandro says.

"It's amazing how much stuff goes down there."

In the white-walled, well-lit tunnels-"they look better than one would think," Leandro says-trucks move stacked with bagels and trailers filled with pre-made salads, soups of the day, and "assembled" but uncooked lasagna.

Dining Services maintains a fleet of Crimson William Decherd UNDERGROUND ODYSSEY: A worker attends a steam plant near Peabody three 10-foot carts-"like golf carts, only a little more heavy-duty," says John J. Mingle, food service supervisor at the College dining halls-and upwards of 10 warming and cooling trailers, all run off battery power.

Leandro estimates that the average-travel time for bagels and other food headed to the Leverett kitchen is about a minute and a half.

"It all happens pretty quick," he says. "It's actually pretty cool."

Rumors Abound

Harvard underground is a world with its own mythology-rumors about crimes committed and escapes made through these tunnels just below the corridors of power.