If you're reading this for the warning about the basement, skip down to the recap, it'll save you from reading a rambling story.

We sent out for our second trip into the Ithaca Gun Factory, this time equipped with working flashlights, in order to check out the parts of the building that we had missed on out first trip: the basement, roof, second, and third levels of the main building and part of another building. After gaining entrance to the building and checking out the upper levels, we proceeded to the basement. We first found ourselves in a room still filled with what appeared to the most of the heating and processing equipment that was too big to remove when the factory closed. After checking that out for awhile we moved on into a series of rooms with nothing much but pipes running through them to all parts of the factory. The pipe rooms were very separated, with dirt floors and they quickly turned into not much more than a maze of crawl spaces connected through holes in the walls. After exploring several dead-ends we happened upon several series of vats, the first of which contained a blood-red liquid, and the others mostly held a dark, opaque liquid that seemed to be a dark green/black in our headlamp light. We didn't think much of it at the time, assuming that these were leftover substances from the lead refining process that might have gone on for the production of shotgun ammo before the factory closed. We continued into the crawls tunnels, first trying an extremely small pipe encasement that turned out to be a dead-end. Although the tunnel was rather disappointing we were lucky that there was a lack of cobwebs that inevitably infest small tunnels which explorers like to crawl through. Father we continued into the maze, and the ground soon became squishy from a trickle of water that seemed to come strait out of one of the walls. While checking out one of the side tunnels I noticed a funny smell. Now I've been in a lot of dark, wet basements in my time, in fact I find myself quite at home in them. I've also been in my share of chemistry labs. When a dark, wet basement smells more like a chemistry lab, instead of a dark, wet basement, usually that’s a bad sign. This is especially disturbing when one stops to think that chemistry labs have very good ventilation to keep harmful inhalation and such to a minimum, and dark, wet basements do not have that luxury. It was then that I noticed that same blood-red liquid that we saw earlier, except this time it was not in a vat. It was instead in tiny pools in the sand. Yea, that should have bean the queue to leave.

I'm going to step back for a moment and give a bit of the background we found of the site while we were digging up the history and doing recon. What we found were some web pages and articles that I put under the news section, and most of them had to do with hazardous material found at the site. Mostly the hazardous material was lead, lots and lots of lead, at one point 43,000 times the amount that would constitute being hazardous. There was also some mention about other chemicals from the lead processes and other such things that went on in the factory, but mostly everything we found was mainly about lead contamination, which the city had bean trying to deal with for several years now. So we knew there were some hazardous substances that could be on the premises, but mostly we thought if we didn't eat of lick anything we shouldn't have to worry, since mainly everything we found said watch out for lead.

Back the story. My partner said he thought we should leave. I wanted to check out another tunnel or two. I checked out another tunnel only to get that same "hey, this reminds me of that smell from that stuff they told us not to inhale" feeling. I turned around and agreed we should get the hell out of the place. While my partner was getting our stuff that we left a bit behind us, I checked out a passage away from the substance sightings and found a hole in the floor of the first floor, which I quickly crawled out of. I then went back and opened a hatch that we found earlier, so that my partner could join me in the fresh air.

It was about here that we really started how bad a situation that basement could be. Strange substances with bad smells, that made us feel a bit lightheaded was a major concern, especially if they could be left over from refining processes. It was about then that we realized that nothing was alive in these tunnels. Now, remember when I mentioned a lack of cobwebs? Yea, thinking back we realized we saw one spider the whole time in the basement. No other life, no bugs, no rats, major lack of spider webs. By the time we got home we decided that a shower and cleaning of everything we had was in order, since pretty much everything we had had gotten wet in tunnels. After we got everything out of our bags, and our clothes and bags into the washing machine I hopped in the shower while my friend tried to look up what substance we had seen in the basement. He thinks its Mercuric Oxide, which is pretty nasty stuff. All I know is the stuff was bright red, and I've never run into a bright red liquid that made me feel light-headed in anything other than a controlled environment involving gloves, goggles, and fume hoods.

This is where the real worrisome articles start popping up. First we found that the Ithaca Gun Factory was a site that the government had do hush hush uranium forging work way back when, and the tests and such most likely emitted quite a bit of uranium dust into the air. Then we found some environmental reports stating the site had lead, silver, arsenic, chromium, mercury, barium, and selenium in amounts that were above New York cleanup standards. So basically the place has more than a safe share of hazardous substances. Now for the recap/my advice.

RECAP
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The Ithaca Gun Factory is a pretty cool site, at least I liked it anyway, although it doesn't take much to make me happy. The site also has a lot of hazardous waste and such in the soil and still laying around in the basement, including lead, silver, arsenic, chromium, mercury, barium, selenium, and there's a slight chance even uranium dust. Most of those would most likely be found in the basement. My advice is to stay out of the pipe tunnels in the basement. In fact, I'd recommend not going into the basement at all, or at least stick to the main machine room and rooms north of that. The pipe tunnels really aren’t that cool, you wouldn't miss much.