The Fifth Expedition

There was a bit of a dead patch for the first few months of this year. It was cold, wet, dark, and not really good weather for the exploration. There was a lot of work on at school as well. Anyway, we needed kicking back into action, so using a little bit of spare cash, we popped down to Machine Mart (every burglars favorite shop), and bought a lovely 24" pair of bolt cutters. The ultimate urban exploration tool, now in the hands of a group of nutcases. After running around chopping screwdrivers and chair legs in halfs, we decided to go and put them to good use, namely the lock on the yard where the cellphone transmitters were.

It's the start of April, and four of us drive up to Cane Hill, loaded with the bolt cutters,crow bar, screwdrivers, hammer, and gat gun (don't ask). Our first port of call is the tower area, this is the real place we wanted to be. Not wanting to hang about too long, I chop the lock off the gate like a red hot knife through butter. Quickly we all move into the smaller courtyard to take a look at the treasures contained within.

The most obvious targets in here are the cell phone transmitter cabinets - they are basically very secure portakabins, and they are normally also alarmed and not worth getting into. Standing around the many coax cables running up the tower quickly gave us headaches, so we decided to look in some of the surrounding buildings.

Most of the windows were already boarded up, and most of the doors securely nailed shut. Too much of a challenge even to four people and a load of tools, so we gave up and found a room with a broken window. Looking in, there were hundreds of bits of electrical equipment, ranging from alarm bell boxes to phones and washing machine pumps to clocks. It must be the electricians department. I climb in, and have a look around. There really is a lot of stuff in here, some worth a bit of money. A huge pile of phones lies on a shelf, they are the old style bell phones so I put a few in my bag as souveniers. Moving onto the next room, I saw one of the weirdest things I have seen in the hospital. A room filled with skip lights. Why, I don't know. It stank of parafin or something, so I didn't hang about long. That was all there was in the courtyard without having to cause some major damage. We left, shutting the newly opened gate carefully behind us.

We decide to have a look at some of the things around the back of the tower, so we walked down the narrow passage in between the tower and the chimney. A smashed window leads into a small room with a single door and some double doors. We all climb in to have a look in there. The floor is littered with barrels and boxes, I'm not sure what they were supposed to contain. There also appears to be a large hole in the floor, but large lumps of concrete, a pallet, and a metal trolley are blocking it quite successfully so we ignore it. A window in this room leads into another room, and through it you can see some big blue cylinders and pipes. The single door looks the best way to get into it, but no matter how hard we kick it and go at it with the crowbar, it just won't move. Ok, so we have to go through the double doors. Suddenly, we hear a noise from the other side of the doors. We stay quiet for a minute, and opt to quickly charge through the double doors, hopefully scaring the others away. Well, that was exactly what we did, and we all charged through only to end up outside again. That was a bit of an anticlimax. Anyway, we leave the room via the window (the undergrowth outside the door was too thick).

Outside this window, there was a drain lid. One of our objectives was to find the way into the tunnels, and this drain lid was different to all the other ones we had lifted, as in it was just a thick metal sheet. Using the crowbar, we lifted up the lid, and saw what we thought must be an entrance to the tunnels. A rectangular brick shaft dropped down about 6 feet, then expanded into what looked like a tunnel. A few cut pipes ran along the sides. There were no step irons or ladder, so going down wasn't really a possibilty. Climbing it like a chimney using your back against one wall, and your feet against the other wasn't really possible due to small pipes and obstructions. We closed the lid, remembering to come back and check this one out properly.

That was about it for this place, so we decided to leave the fenced off parts of the hospital. We walked all the way around the perimeter, looking for other interesting places to explore, but not much turned up. We did test the bolt cutters one more time by slicing straight through the middle of a fence. One of us made a quick entrance into a ward, but there was nothing interesting, so we soon left.

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