About this album
Fun little military urbex location in the Ottawa region. Not much to report during my visit, main attractions is the tower and the old frame skeleton of the operations base. Happy to have gone in the spring given the dense vegetation which undoubtedly will obscure more of the site when the leaves come back. Clearly has become a dump site for garbage over the years, but for the keen-eyed one can still see remains of the buildings former self. Within the fenced in perimeters one can find small dump sites of both industrial and residential waste. For those interested, there are a few other internet urbex pages I found after the trip which have documentation of the site over years (as far back as 2004) which provide images of how the structure and its surroundings have decayed over time. These can be easily found by searching for “MLC test fence site 012 Ruins” and provided me with the info for this short history below.
Brief History of the site: Hidden in the forests south of Ottawa, the abandoned MLC Site 012 — also known as the South Gloucester test fence site — stands as a rusting relic of the Cold War. Part of the experimental section of Canada’s Mid Canada Line, or “McGill Fence,” the site once played a critical role in continental air defense during the 1950s and early 1960s. Positioned between the distant DEW Line and the southern Pinetree Line, the Mid Canada Line functioned as a massive electronic trip-wire stretching across the 55th parallel. Using Doppler radar principles, transmissions between towers would be disrupted whenever an aircraft crossed between them, alerting the military to potential Soviet bombers entering North American airspace.
Today, the site feels frozen in time. The weathered microwave tower still rises above the tree line, its rusted transmitter and receiver dishes hanging silently over the surrounding forest. Despite sitting directly beneath the flight path of the Ottawa airport, the tower no longer carries warning lights or visibility markings, adding to the eerie atmosphere of the abandoned installation. Decommissioned as radar and jet technology rapidly evolved in the 1960s, sites like MLC 012 were left behind — forgotten monuments to an era defined by paranoia, innovation, and the constant fear of nuclear war.
