Industrial Plant

On Sunday July 11th I headed out on a day trip with my friend Arturo.  We decided to explore an abandoned chemical plant.  This plant had once produced fertilizer.  Water was injected into underground caverns to dissolve the deposits of minerals.  This brine was pumped to the surface and the water was evaporated away, leaving the chemicals behind.  There was quite a sizeable operation on this site at one point in time, but it was shuttered in the 1980's.  Eventually all hope of restarting it was abandoned, and the buildings were torn down and the equipment removed.

All that remains of the original operation is some foundations, and part of the power plant.  There is a large gas turbine, connected to a big generator.  The building that once housed it is gone, and the equipment is slowly rusting away.  Looters have stripped down much of the equipment and stolen the copper wire for scrap.

Around the turn of the millennium the site was resurrected and a test operation was set up.  I understand that they explored the possibility of using the underground caverns for storage.  I'm not clear if they were planning to store waste oil and chemicals, or if it was to capture carbon dioxide.  Obviously that operation failed as well.  There are some remnants of that operation still on site, including a trailer, with a control room, and a massive monitoring station.  This included all sorts of valves and piping, gauges and sensors, much of it still there.  There are some large tanks and many smaller barrels that sit abandoned, leaking oil.  So, it seems the waste oil storage idea was possibly what was being considered.

Arturo and I photographed here for several hours.  We were left completely on our own, and no one questioned our presence.  I always find it difficult to photograph abandoned stuff like this as the subject is so busy and cluttered and it is difficult to distill any sort of concise composition.  But we gave it a valiant try and I think I shot something like half a dozen different setups.  It remains to be seen if anything yields a printable image.

The day was fairly hazy.  I think it must have been smoke from the 300+ forest fires burning over in British Columbia.  The town of Lytton was wiped out by a fire during the recent heat wave.  If you looked straight up you could see that the sky was mostly blue.  But looking horizontally it was very grey and hazy.  Fortunately by mid afternoon the breeze seemed to clear things off a little.