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Just east of the Havens Landing RV Park in Montgomery County, a cold war relic is buried beneath 50 feet of earth.

"You know, no one really got a chance to come down here and see what was here," Westlin Corporation's David Herr said.

Now, some 16 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the owners of a 25-year-old nuclear fallout shelter have converted it into a secure underground data center.

Houston-based Continental Airlines recently chose the site as a back-up operations center to use in the event of a citywide disaster like Hurricane Rita posed last year.

The underground bunker will house the airline’s backup computers and data systems to monitor its planes around the globe in the event Continental can not use its primary control room at its headquarters in downtown Houston.

“It’s virtually impenetrable,” said Julie King, a spokeswoman for Continental Airlines.

Designed in the 1980s by a Chinese oilman fearful of a third world war, the 50-feet deep bunker was capable of sustaining 1,500 people for up to 90 days. The 40,000 square foot bunker is outfitted with its own utilities such as water and power, plus was built with oddities like a morgue and jail cells.

"Remember that the bunker was built for almost 700 people for a couple of months," Westlin said. "My daughter asked me the same question when we went through this. I said, 'you know you're down here in the bunker with that many people; there's no TV, no Internet, no radio. All you can do is sit around and play Monopoly and Scrabble with everybody else.' She said, 'OK, now I understand.'"

Continental recently retrofitted 15,000 square feet of an above ground building near the bunker to house up to 275 of its staffers if the airline ever had to evacuate its Houston skyscraper. That structure alone is built with bulletproof glass. The underground facility would only be manned by several of the airline’s IT employees in the event a Category Three hurricane or higher threatened Houston, said Julie King, a spokeswoman for Continental.

The Westlin Corporation now manages the site, which is 55 miles northwest of downtown Houston. Westlin leases out the two-level underground shelter to companies like Continental looking for a secure space to store data.

Twenty companies use it to house duplicate computer servers.

Anadarko Petroleum reportedly rents space at the bunker along with the government of Montgomery County and other companies.