Noccalula Falls - Steel Plant pics added

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cashman

cashman

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Sep 13, 2007
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Let's go for a ride around my neighborhood. The first pic is looking North in front of my house.

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Looking South

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My street is not very photogenic but if you go beyond the horizon it gets kinda neat. We'll first head South about 3 blocks to the brow area.

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At the brow. It's kind of a lovers lane area. I'm riding the Blue SS today.

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This is Gadsden Alabama. It has ranked among one of the cheapest places to live in the USA. There is a river (Coosa) that runs through it. We have hydroelectric power and low property taxes. We have a growing community of retiree's.
Now let's head North and it's all downhill from here. We'll head to Noccalula Falls Park. It's less than a 1/2 mile away.

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The entrance to the park.

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In front of the Veterans Memorial just inside the park.

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They run two of these mini trains. They have a nice boarding platform for the train, but I didn't want to spend six bucks to take a pic of it. Noccalula Falls is the big draw below.

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The City manages the park and has an RV park nearby.

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Inside the campground. Being a holiday weekend it was full.

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You can feed the ducks and geese for a quarter.

This is the end of the A tour. The B tour is a lot more interesting.

I made a trip there the next day and hiked over 2 miles along the bottom of the gorge to get under the falls. It was a mile of agony each way over jagged slippery rocks, rough vegetation and a group of lost and dehydrated teenagers. Took me about 3 hours each way. The only way you can access the bottom of the falls now is by hiking up the gorge. They have a stairway that goes down into the gorge at the park but the city has put up a fence and locked the gate leading to the stairs. Too many people get into trouble down there I guess?

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You can get an idea of the size of the falls by seeing the two dudes near the center of the pic. I wish that I'd had a more powerful flash on the camera.

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The falls are about 90 feet tall.

Hope you liked the ride around my neighborhood.
Thanks!!!

Here are some steelplant pics. The plant is about 1 1/2 miles away from my house. The closest beach we have is about 300 miles from here.

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This is a pic of the #2 furnace made several years ago before it was taken down. You can see the transport cars used to haul the molten steel to the Basic Oxygen Furnace which was in the background. We called them "submarines" due to their shape.

Here is all that's left of it now. The powerhouse is still standing in the background. It still has the original Westinghouse generators installed in 1912 inside. It generated all the 440V DC used in the plant.

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Kinda eerie scene. This is a recent pic and here is where the coke ovens were. The stockhouse and the chimneys in the foreground are scheduled to be taken down soon. Thanks!!!
 
I love those falls, excellent setting, and cheers for taking the time to scan those steelplant pics, that's quite surreal to see them disappear like that...brings back memories 8)

A little while ago I came across recent pics of Tjernobyl Russia, and it is amazing to see how fast nature takes over again, even under those circumstances.
 
great pictures. those falls are beautiful. and like the abandoned factory stuff too. i'm always intrigued by areas like that.
 
Since some of you guys seem like fans of industrial decay, here are some more steelplant pics. These are some that my dad and I made several years ago before they started tearing it down. Dad knew all the guards at the gate and they let us drive around and make all the pics we wanted. I and was going to go back and make some more but the EPA took over the site and restricted all access not long after these were made.

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This is at ground level of the blast furnace looking up at the shuttle car ways. The shuttle cars carried the iron making ingredients to the top of the vessel. The furnace itself is about 130 feet tall. It was built in 1942 by the Kaiser Steel Corp under contract for the US Government. It remained Government property until the plant closed. It was listed as a strategic target during the cold war.

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Here is a view of the stoves. These were used to heat the air blown into the furnace through the bustle pipe. I remember hearing these things when they were heated up. You could hear the straining of the steel as they expanded and they put off a lot of heat. Kinda like they were alive.

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This is not a real good pic, but here is a view of the casthouse. This was the business end of the furnace and it was about 50 feet above the ground. The white material in the center of the pic is the refractory material and it covers the iron notch. The iron notch is where the molten pig iron flows out. A hydraulic drill was swung in place and it drilled a hole through the refractory and allowed the iron to flow out. There is another notch above this one on the other side of the furnace called the cinder notch. The cinder notch was opened first and it allowed the slag on top of the iron to flow out. The slag was sent over to a company on site that used it to make concrete and asphalt. The pig iron was sent to a Basic Oxygen Furnace next door for refining into finished steel.

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Here is a view of the coke ovens. You can see the pusher used to push the coke out of the ovens. Also you can see the stockhouse in the back ground. The coke ovens were used to "cook" the coal and was one of the ingredients in making iron.

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This is a recent pic of the coke ovens site. The stockhouse is still standing. Also the quinching tower in the back ground is still standing. When the weather was right, you could see the colume of steam coming from the quinching tower for over 30 miles. The steam cloud would make strange shapes sometimes in the atmospere high above.

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This pic is from several years ago and one my dad made of me standing beside a Hyster straddlebuggy. These were used to transport the steel pigs and finished ingots between the various processing plants in the mill.

When the plant was in operation, it was a fully intergrated mill and they had several processing mills on site. They had a roll mill and one of their big customers was Murray in Lawrenceburgh TN. The plate mill supplied a lot of the steel to the ship building industry in Pascaugoula MS and Mobile AL. At one point there were over 7500 employees that worked there. Hope you enjoyed the pics. Thanks!!!
 
Great pics! The view south of your house looking toward's torw remind's me of the West hills area of Portland ,Or. The falls are great! Here in Klamath FALLS-we have none! :? :? :? :? Musta been cause the dammed it up in the 20's! :wink:
L8 EM
 
Great pics cashman!
... to follow up with the link Ace sent... (links below)

Sorry that I'm off the bicycle topic but, coming from the Kansas City area we had ARMCO Steel and much like the pics above it is just a few buildings and memories now. I'm fascinated by what mankind has built and abandoned, the history, the stories etc. When you have had your fill of bicycles for the day try googling "abandoned cities", abandoned steel", or even "abandoned russian military"... Here's a few that will keep you busy for some time.

- http://weburbanist.com/2007/08/30/urban ... ern-world/ ... amazing links/pics, make your jaw drop on some.
- http://www.lostamerica.com/ ... just cool pics
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/curioush/s ... 086038240/ ... more cool pics

Sorry, I'm wacky... LOL. It's just that the pics posted by cashman and the link posted by Ace is something I find interesting from a historical perspective.

Clark
 
Fantastic pics, I dare say the best of the section.

Be glad that the steel plant is abandoned, if not it would have an adverse effect on your air quality and possibly your health and all of those around you. I'm currently in Cleveland where the ArcelorMittal steel plant was ruining the place until the economic downturn forced them to turn off the furnaces. How bad was it? Well, it gave me an incurable neurological disorder and the people in the neighboring communities would have "house cleaning parties" where they would walk around the neighborhood with buckets of water and sponges, washing the soot and pollution off their cars and the sides of their houses. If they didn't, the soot and pollution would eventually eat all the paint off.

When the ArcelorMittal steel plant was running in Cleveland, the pollution was so bad you can't see buildings less than a mile away:

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The difference between a good air day and a bad:

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I don't know how other steel plants operated, but ArcelorMittal is the worst, and they routinely ignore local government's attempts to make them more responsible to their surrounding towns, around the globe. Google "mittal steel pollution" and you'll see what I mean. It's even worse in the old soviet satellite states.
 
Yea Cleveland, your right about the pollution. During the summer when we had high humidity and a thunder bumper came across the area, sometimes the sky would turn yellow and dump yellow rain water over everything close to the plant. The air got better later on after they closed down the #1 furnace and put in more scrubbers at the #2 furnace. Oddly, one of the byproducts of the particals taken from the scrubbers was red pigment refined at the Sintering mill that had the consistency of flour. They sold it to cosmetic companies for use in makeup. The cost of complying with enviromental regulations was one of the things that finally put them out of business. A lot of the guys that retired from there suffered job related respiratory ailments like Mesothileoma. Long time operators of the plant was the Republic Steel Corp and they were based in Cleveland. The air is a lot cleaner here now that the plant has closed, but many of the younger people of the area have had to move to larger cities where the air pollution there is just as bad as it was here when the steel plant was operating to find opportunity. Thanks!!!
 
That's interesting Ace! Looks kinda like some of the scenes around Redstone Arsenal here in Alabama. I grew up during the space race and have seen the space industry go from boom to bust many times and it's just in a down cycle right now. It won't be too long where human space travel will be needed on a regular basis to repair and upgrade communication satellites and such. Space propulsion and guidance systems are perfected enough now that private industry can meet the challenge. And there will be a whole lot more opportunity for someone to work in the space industry when private enterprise finally takes over. BTW here is a recent pic of the old steel mill site since they have dismantled the power plant.

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Ran across this pic of the blast furnace when the steel plant was still in operation at night. Here they have the iron notch open allowing the heated pig iron to flow out of the furnace down to the rail cars. When we had low cloud cover at night it was like someone turning on a light bulb in the sky when they emptied the furnace.

Thanks!!!
 

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