When dirt starts accumulating in strange places around a prison, you've got a problem. In March 2005 at the US-run Camp Bucca prison near the southern town of Umm Qasr, officials began finding dirt in the toilets and other places. The very ground appeared to be changing color.
Troops mounted an extensive search and uncovered a series of tunnels, including a 600-foot-long hollow that extended beyond the security fence. The Washington Post reported at the time:
In the darkest hours before dawn, groups of 10 detainees toiled 15 feet beneath Compound 5 of America's largest prison in Iraq. The men worked in five-minute shifts, digging with shovels fashioned from tent poles and hauling the dirt to the surface with five-gallon water jugs tethered to 200 feet of rope. They bagged it in sacks that had been used to deliver their bread rations and spread it surreptitiously across a soccer field where fellow inmates churned it during daily matches, guards and detainees recalled.
The 105th Military Police Battalion, charged with running Camp Bucca in the scorching desert of southernmost Iraq, knew something was amiss: Undetectable to the naked eye, the field's changing color was picked up by satellite imagery. The excavated dirt was also clogging the showers and two dozen portable toilets. The dirt was showing up under the floorboards of tents; some guards sensed that the floor itself seemed to be rising. Mysteriously, water use in the compound had spiked.
According to the Post, an informant tipped off the Americans only hours before a planned prison break on March 24, 2005. The entrance to the tunnel, which became known as "The Great Escape" tunnel, was under a floorboard, according to a BBC report. A spokesman "said it was believed that the tunnels had been dug over several weeks and prisoners had waited for poor weather and low visibility before trying to make an escape."
Following the incident, Camp Bucca replaced the prisoners' tents with concrete-bottomed buildings.
