I'd been eying a relatively small steel mill building for years now, and had decided to go check it out; the place was a ruin, and still an active industrial site, but I needed to get photos of it, due to the oddity of this building.
Mounds of iron reach four to five stories into the sky
We were so far off road that the only sounds were of stressed metal, many of these small structures were locked up, and I assume were part of an employee program.
An old railcar lay in front of the towering steel walls, it is symmetrical on both sides, so I assume it went both directions and was some kind of small moving device. I don't know a lot about them.
One of many oddities we saw at a scrapyard that occupied the demolished half of the mill
After hopping a few barbed fences, fences shrouded by tree and loose iron; the plant was coming into view
Here you can see the cross-section of the building, on the left half is the extension structure, and on the right is the original one; you can tell by the difference in architecture. See that catwalk that got sliced off?
The girders for this steel mill were massive, about four or five feet wide I'd guess, made of two I-beams, connected like railroad trusses
There seemed to be a lot of odd bits and pieces, old steel parts that had been left behind for some reason
Plant life reaches towards the light coming in from the gaping hole in the side of the building
It's just so insane, the place is so big that their crane needs a staircase on it, I find it cool that they just have this low-hanging stairwell that can park anywhere along the line.. to the right you can see the hole that leads into the smokestack
Here I climbed a long flight of stairs, alas the electrical rooms had been locked up for a while
This is the electrical rooms from the outside, I always liked seeing when they tore down a building and you could see a doorway so high up. Judging by the concrete lining and cut-off steel supports, this room likely had a second floor
By the end of the trip we went to check out this towering room which had been sliced on the other axis, it gave a beautiful view that I assume not many had seen before; this was mad easier by the fact that there were catwalks so high up.
Here is a silhouette photo with the stairwell in the background
The height is not for the faint-of-heart, we were over 50 feet above the ground, the wind blowing through and flapping the sheet-metal, very loud.
Somewhere down at the bottom was a pile of gears, each 2' in diameter
Over all this mill was pretty much empty, but it was an interesting site.
