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What’s a water table?

Image: Disney

I don’t want to turn this conversation into a geology lesson, but something about the greater Orlando area is germane to the utilidor discussion. If you’re not a geologist and don’t feel like taking a quick SAT test, a water table is the upper level of an underground surface. It’s here that the soil (and any accompanying rock formation) is fully saturated with water. Using more basic terms, the water table is the soggy earth.

What’s the problem with soggy earth? Unless you’re a builder, the answer is nothing. For folks in construction, it’s a waking nightmare. Areas cursed with high water tables can’t have simple things…like basements. Whereas Disneyland oftentimes built attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion below the surface, that’s a physical impossibility at Magic Kingdom.

During the early days of park construction, Imagineers addressed this problem in a novel way. They leaned into the issue. They built Seven Seas Lagoon as a man-made solution to the swamp land problem. Builders razed the region and then filled in the artificial lake with soil from the elevated water table. Afterward, and this is the brilliant part, they took some of the dirt from the new “lagoon” to provide stability to a pre-built load-bearing ground floor. This is the place where Disney added the tunnels that we now know as utility corridors, aka utilidors.

Utilifacts

The logistics of this solution are amazing. Disney faced a seemingly impossible dilemma with construction on soft earth. They addressed it by crafting an entire man-made body of water close to the existing natural Bay Lake. As a side project, they mined the dislodged earth, thereby finding new utility. Disney moved between seven and eight million cubic yards of earth from Seven Seas Lagoon to this new construction site.

At this new position where Disney officials were more comfortable with the water table, they built a first floor that is 15 feet high, which is actually one and a half stories tall rather than a single story. It’s why the first gate at Walt Disney World rests 14 feet off the ground (four feet higher than I joked at the start of the story…you’ll never feel taller than when you walk down Main Street at Magic Kingdom).  The amazing part is that the utilidors stretch across more than nine acres of land. Yes, the utilidors at Magic Kingdom are the equivalent of almost seven football fields in size.

What’s remarkable is that Disney didn’t dig a single tunnel to create their underground labyrinth. Instead, they simply started building up from the ground using prefabs. Even the term underground is misleading. It references the fact that the utilidors are under the surface of Magic Kingdom. They are NOT, however, below the ground itself. The terminology is confusing since it’s one of the strangest theme park builds to date. It’s almost a riddle. When is the ground not the ground?

The shape of the utilidor system is also fascinating. If you ever look at the blueprints, you’ll see a giant, seemingly haphazardly drawn circle or, if you’re an MMA fan, a poorly drawn octagon. The walking path bisects the middle of it. Oddly, it slopes down for a bit prior to returning to the previous height. That’s a concession to the maintenance of the moat surrounding Cinderella Castle. The most eye-grabbing structure at Magic Kingdom is also the de facto point of origin for the utilidors. To wit, the first two floors of Cinderella Castle ARE utilidors.

All the corridors flowing from the castle’s underground octagon provide direct access to various themed lands in seemingly divergent parts of Magic Kingdom. That’s by design. Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) knew where they were going to place the Seven Seas Lagoon dirt, and that prescience informed their decisions on where to position regions such as Adventureland and Frontierland. In fact, other than the middle section, the only truly straight utilidor path runs between these two lands.

The next closest section is a small walkway from what Disney maps designate as Stairway #18 (an entry point close to the gates at Main Street, U.S.A.) to Stairway #17 (near Crystal Palace). As Disney fans know, that’s an extremely short distance. Most of the other stairway-to-stairway connections running underground traverse a curved path, a concession to the above ground landscaping and construction demands.

Using utilidors, Disney employees could connect the dots from point A to point B. Even better, they could run these paths below the surface where guests would never know that thousands of cast members lurked beneath them. When you’re at Magic Kingdom, you’re standing on top of lots of people! Also – and this is just to blow your mind a bit – the combination of the elevated water table and the utilidors causes Main Street U.S.A. to reside 107 feet above sea level. And here you thought you were standing at sea level right in the middle of old swamp land.

 
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