I do have an improved version of the official Octothorpes WordPress plugin, but unfortunately the original authors have refused to open-source it, and without an open source license attached to the original files I built on, I can't share it. <rant>I have to express some frustration. I'm extremely disappointed that Octothorpes do not seem to work at all. The whole project is a brilliant idea—I went for it hook, line, and sinker. In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately started working on improving things, such as their extremely lacking WordPress integration plugin... so eagerly, in fact, that I put in a lot of work before testing whether Octothorpes actually work at all. And it appears that they don't. At least, I couldn't ever get them to, despite sinking several long nights into it. Disappointingly, I had to add a lot of unneeded extra structure to my site code to even try and get Octothorpes working—contrary to what the documentation suggested—and even after doing everything right, as confirmed by their debugging tool, my Octothorpes never appeared on their server. Given that I never got it to work and couldn't find anyone who was able to assist me, all the complexity I had to add to my site in the effort—such as serving Octothorpe-specific page versions, like the one you are looking at right now—became needless cruft. So after a few very long nights of fruitlessly spinning my wheels, I've given up, and removed it all again. I have to add that I'm disappointed. I'm not used to showing up enthusiastic to contribute to an open-source project and so quickly winding up walking away with absolutely nothing, no involvement, no ability to use or run it, no interest in my desire to contribute (even code I've already finished!), nothing. Maybe I've been lucky before now. Octothorpes are a brilliant idea, in concept. I hope they work someday, and become a project that might see wide adoption and contribution by enthusiastic developers. (And that the main devs see the value in WordPress plugin developers expressing an interest in authoring OP integrations with WordPress... 43% of the world's websites can't be wrong...) Sorry to rant, but, my site, my several nights of work lost, my prerogative to express it.</rant>Frustrated rant about it here, click to read...
Seeing as how this Octothorpe-compliant low-bandwidth page version serves no purpose anymore (and doesn't contain any code related to the Octothorpe service anymore, except for noticing visitors using URLs referencing it, in order to show this message), you probably want to view the original page in its complete technicolor glory at https://michaelkupietz.com/berkeley-steam-tunnels-exploration/.
Back around 2005-2006, as social media took off, I was a member of an urban exploration chat group, memory fails but it was probably something on Tribe or Friendster. Mentioning my interest in the UC Berkeley Steam Tunnels—a fabled network of sometimes-dangerous underground utility tunnels cross-crossing the UC Berkeley campus, which had once been well-traveled by intrepid explorers but had since been sealed off, with all access supposedly welded shut, although as of this writing I can find no evidence online of this other than an absence of any reported explorations after about 2001, and one or two scattered online claims of later access (which happen to jibe with the experience I'm about to relate)—I was contacted by privately by an old-school liberty-spiked homeless punk kid named Spider, who said he knew a way in.
After a preliminary meeting to discuss, as well as being regaled by Spider's tales of how to ride for free on Amtrak and BART, we met up on evening at a building on the UC Berkeley campus where Spider and a female companion had earlier in the day propped a window open in a basement bathroom before the building was locked for the night. Slipping in, in what I believe is the only actual B&E of a live site in my entire life, and from there past a door Spider said was alarmed, through another door and down a flight of stairs into a sub-basement, then through some further utility rooms and up and down metal staircases, finally through small hatch in a wall, and we were in the famous Berkeley Steam Tunnels, where I snapped the following handful of photos.
Besides the long walkways full of steam pipes, and the closed-off areas where Spider said there was asbestos, the tunnels did indeed, as the rumors had said, lead through the basements of several buildings. I don't know which ones, but as is apparent from the photos, at least one building on the Berkeley campus has giant basement vats of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, better known as lye, either of which is capable of fully dissolving the lipids that hold together human beings.
There was surprisingly little graffiti down there, indicating there hadn't been much traffic in the recent decades since tagging became popular. Aside from some illegible words scratched on the tunnel side of the entry hatch, the sole evidence of other explorers in these photos were the faux Latin "Et Ego In Undercampo" someone had written with a finger on a dusty pipe.
Later on I asked Spider how he'd known the first door was alarmed. He said, "I tested it." I said, "How'd you do that?" He said, "I opened it and waited around to see if anybody showed up." "What'd you tell them when they showed up?" "I told them I didn't know who opened the door." Spider had an insouciance I have to admit I found charismatic.
He also offered me a couple of free BART tickets (that's SF's subway, for those unfamiliar, you add fare to paper magnetic-stripe tickets at ticketing machines) off a huge stack he had, all stocked up with $7.20 in fare each, and said he'd gotten them for free. I asked him, "How do you get a stack of free $7.20 BART tickets?" He said, "There's a trick."
Content originally from https://michaelkupietz.com/berkeley-steam-tunnels-exploration/. © copyright 2025 Michael E. Kupietz