End of an era

Todays ride was under gorgeous sunny skies, and low humidity.  The last week has been muggy and thundershowers all week, but Friday night a front blew through and pushed all that out.   I went out for a ride today with no particular plan, but I ended up at Sparrows Point Steel Mill.  The mill has been closed for about a year now, the last owners were unable to find a buyer for it.  Once upon a time it employed tens of thousands of people, had a shipyard (that my Dad's first ship he captained was built at, he was telling me about going out there to pick it up in the 70's), and was a huge economic engine for the area.  At any rate, they are slowly demolishing it now, and since there was no security there, I threw my bike over the jersey walls that block the entrances and went to have a look.

Demolition is moving right along, as you can see.

One of the buildings was open so I went in to have a look.

These are enormous generator parts, that's my bike sitting at the foot of one of them.

I am assuming that this once was someones means to get around the plant.

More generator parts here.

The plant is huge, it covers an area about 2 miles by 4 miles, and is slowly being brought down.

This is the galvanizing line, soon to be scrap.

It was mostly me and the local bird life, now that things are quiet they are making nests.

Hard to tell the scale here, but these are 3" diamater steel cables just laying in the dirt.

This is the blast furnace, shut down now.  When they were trying to sell the plant still they had a skeleton crew on to keep this running, once you shut it down it's ruined.

I am not sure what this building did, but the towers with the spiral staircases were pretty cool looking.

More bird life.

The blast furnace from the other side.

This gives you an idea of how big and busy the plant used to be, they had their own traffic lights.  They are still running, but nobody is there now.

Then it was back to the house to clean up.