Bell SCP Labs
The agency that would eventually become known as the SCP Foundation was founded in 1947 as the Containment Section of Bell Telephone Laboratories.
Staffed by a mix of ex-OSS, ex-military soldiers, and Bell scientists, the Section suppressed public knowledge of anomalies and studied the physics-defying properties of the anomalous artifacts.
Bell's massive staff rolls, huge revenues, and relative secrecy allowed the Section to hide in plain sight more effectively than a government agency could at the time.
Their research and containment efforts were secret conditions of Bell's monopoly grant.
In 1982, Bell was shattered and the Section could no longer hide within the giant corporation.
Questions were being asked about this mysterious organization and its secretive facilities across the country.
A solution had to be found quickly.
The existence of the Containment Section's bunkers underneath AT&T's microwave towers was dismissed as being due to cold war fears of nuclear armageddon.
Floor plans and pictures in the Bell archives were doctored to make the containment facilities appear like bomb shelters
The SCP Foundation was created in its current form in 1983 and was immediately granted a 999-year lease by AT&T on all of the Containment Section's facilities
Some historians have argued that the Bell breakup was partially motivated by a desire to bring the Containment Section directly under federal control, but the US government, AT&T, and Western Electric all refused requests for comment, so we may never know the truth.
According to pictures posted on an urbex blog before the mysterious disappearance of the blog and its author, the bunker underneath one Long Lines tower in Ohio was a large base of operations for the Containment Section.
The tunnels of the bunker extended for miles if our intrepid pseudonymous explorer is to be believed, and signage directed staff to containment cells and a reactor, among various other facilities.
Of course, they headed down the hallway to the reactor.
Given how well-lit and maintained the tunnels looked, our explorer was surprised not to be stopped by anyone, and grew increasingly suspicious.
They headed towards the distant rumble of what had to be the reactor.
They came to a door labeled "REACTOR CONTROL", reached for the handle, and, upon discovering that it was unlocked, stepped inside.
As they opened the door, they nearly ran into a woman walking out the door holding what appeared to be a clipboard in one hand and a brick-like phone with a curiously-shaped antenna in the other.
She was startled, but quickly regained her cool.
"Ah, you must be the tech from WestElec. I was just about to call and ask where you were"
Our explorer realized that posing as the expected technician was the only path that didn't end in bunker jail.
"I'm Becca [expunged], the chief engineer of the reactor here. It's an old model 4291 organic-cooled unit, but it's been holding up pretty well until now."
"well, I'm Frank Curry, and the central office didn't tell me what was wrong before they sent me out", they said, quickly choosing a fake name out of fear of what would inevitably happen when the subterfuge was discovered
she sighed, as if to ask why the central office is the way it is
"a euclid got out and curdled the entire coolant refinery.. and the blood of three of my engineers"
"a euclid?" they asked, not expecting to hear about the famous mathematician
"shit. you're not cleared, are you? I need your help now; we'll sort out clearances later if we can pull off the failsafe procedures. radioactive chunky marinara doesn't need a security clearance and that's what'll be left of us if we don't fix this now."
she passed them the clipboard, which had a diagram of a complicated series of interconnected pipes labeled with acronyms
most of the pipes had been crossed out in red pen
"everything before DT-27 is completely unusable. if my math is right, we have 5,000 liters of coolant left"
"that can't buy us enough time to make the reaction stop, and we can't produce any more without a complete overhaul of the refinery," she said
"remind me again, what's the thermal cap of what's in there?" they said
"roughly twice that of H2O"
"what's the flow rate on the incoming water main?"
"not enough, and where would you send the hot water?"
they wracked their brain, searching for something, anything, that could save them
"would thermal shock on the control rods fuck us over too much?"
Becca looked at them with surprise and hope
"this sounds like the right type of insane"
"this bunker is some sort of research facility, so there's gotta be a helium-cooled MRI or something we can take the He from and empty into the rod chamber as we force them down"
"hmm.. I think the big containment chamber down on level 3 uses liquid helium"
"how screwed are we if we drain the helium from that?"
Becca shrugged
"whatever's there is so secret that I've got no clue what it is; I've just seen the plumbing diagrams and know where the helium pipes are"
"if there's enough helium for serious plumbing, there's gotta be something gigantic to dump all the heat pulled from that. we use as little helium as possible to freeze the control rods in place and then connect the reactor to the heatsink"
Becca began leafing through the papers scattered around the control panel and punching numbers into her calculator
"okay.. this might just work if we can get the helium in before we run out of conventional coolant, but we need to be quick"
Frank picked up a pipe wrench from next to the control panel
"I'll be frank with you: I've never touched a reactor before and I'm just pulling this out of my ass"
Becca smiled
"I should've guessed. Nobody from Western Electric would seriously consider doing this"
She pushed aside a manhole in the hallway outside of the control room and started climbing down into a mess of pipes, beckoning Frank to follow
"the interconnect is around here somewhere and we should have hoses nearby" she said
Frank turned open a valve on a thick pipe labeled COOLANT, sending out a small cloud of orange steam
Becca handed them a hose, which they hooked up to the intake valve. As she opened the valve on the other end, frost began to form on the hose.
With a sound like a small explosion, the hose split open, spraying liquid helium all over the pipe-filled crawlspace
"run back and drop the rods! I'll patch the hose somehow" Frank shouted to Becca
They took a tarp laying on the floor and formed it into a crude chute for the liquid helium. The helium remained mostly liquid and they hoped enough was getting to the control rods
"temp's dropping! it actually fucking worked!" she shouted down the manhole
Almost every light in the tunnel abruptly cut out, with only a few exit signs still lit
Frank climbed out of the manhole and Becca took his hand
She began to run through the pitch-black corridors towards the way Frank had come in
"I need to get you out of here before someone starts asking who you are and why you're here"
They could see the light at the top of the stairs; the Long Lines section must not've been connected to the reactor.
"None of this ever happened. I don't exist, and neither will you if Security gets wind of what happened" she said to him
Against their better judgement, "Frank" posted a small gallery of photos of the Long Lines section of the beginning of the tunnels and wrote up this story for their blog, but the entire blog was swiftly taken down by agents unknown and the blogger was never heard from again.
I'd like to hope that "Frank" ended up in this secret world of underground nuclear reactors and anomalous science, but I fear the worst.
SCP security is believed to be ruthless and nobody has encountered them and returned to tell the tale.
I fear that this thread, in which I have collected all extant knowledge about the Containment Section, will suffer the same fate as their blog post, but felt like posting it anyway.