20 years after 9/11, a look inside the STRATCOM bunker

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - Twenty years ago Saturday, President George W. Bush flew to Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue to get a better handle on our nation under attack.

The historical 55th wing, featuring a safety bunker, hosted President Bush on Sept. 11 and provided the safety and security necessary for President Bush to make his crucial decisions regarding the nation’s safety. The bunker, designed to withstand a nuclear blast, is located 40 feet underground and has enough space and rooms to serve as a hotel for the president and his team.

The president came to Bellevue from Louisiana and Florida that day to talk with his national security team. He wanted to know more about the terrorist attacks in New York, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.

“The President and a lot of his team came down here,” said Mike Hoskins, Offutt’s Deputy Director of Plans and Programs. “The secret service and advisors were down here, and all day, the president had been looking to communicate with people that weren’t around him at the time.”

The 55th wing bunker has since been dismantled and is no longer in use. In fact, STRATCOM moved command and control operations to a new facility on Offutt Air Force Base in 2019.

Copyright 2021 WOWT. All rights reserved.

Related stories

9/11 artifacts share ‘pieces of truth’ in victim stories

The collection of some 22,000 personal artifacts provide a mosaic of lost lives and stories of survival: wallets, passports, baseball gloves, shoes, clothes, and rings.

‘We will live with the scars the rest of our lives’

Across the country, it was 10:03 a.m. and United Flight 93 had just crashed into a Pennsylvania field. Jack Grandcolas still remembers waking up at 7:03 that morning and catching a fleeting vision that looked like an angel ascending.

As the decades pass, the act of remembering 9/11 evolves

Nearly one-fifth of the country is too young to remember firsthand the day that changed everything.

Surviving 9/11 was ‘just the first piece of the journey’

Sept. 11 survivors bear scars and the weight of unanswerable questions. They get told to “get over” 9/11. But they also say they have gained resilience, purpose, appreciation, and resolve.