Last week’s contest was won by Liberal Scientist for his second win in a row. It was the brick tower in Scranton, PA that you see at the beginning of the intro for The Office.
This week’s location is somewhere in Washington state, good luck!
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Similar, but not it…
http://binged.it/xjWz0J
@1
Man, that’s close. Hard to believe that’s not it, but the configuration of those large round ducts is not right.
What kind of plant is that? That might help.
I’ve looked around Seattle, Bremerton, Tacoma, Richland/Hanford, Spokane – no dice yet (though the Kaiser plant in Spokane was similar)
You know what’s really weird, on google map, that plant doesn’t exist – check it out.
I wonder which one is more up to date?
I think it’s an Alcoa plant – I’ve found several – one in Arkansas, that look just like this.
http://binged.it/wIFCe7
Kaiser Aluminum in Mead, WA
There’s another one just like it in Wenatchee, but wrong Bird’s Eye View.
Here’s one in Ferndale! Not right, either.
Very nicely done, milwhcky!!
@2 You were right there when you looked at the Kaiser mill in Spokane (Mead). This one was originally operated by Alcoa in the 1940’s, which is probably why it looks so similar to the other Alcoa mills.
I thought it might be operational, but from the look of the parking lot, obviously not. Not too many aluminum smelters left operating in Washington and there used to be a bunch.
@9
On the google map, just next to that plant you first identified, was a power substation labeles “BPA ALCOA SUBSTATION”.
That got me looking at Alcoa plants, but while I was searching – you got to the right on first, not (presently) Alcoa.
When I looked around Spokane, I was just searching industrial areas – along waterfronts and train tracks – and I saw the Kaiser works to the east, but missed the right one you found to the north.
Damn you milwhcky! ;)
How did you find the first one, near Vancouver, in the first place?
As this is a political blog, I think I’ll throw a little politics into this.
Our friends of the other party are opposed to any kind of government intervention in the economy, period. Let markets work, they say. And NO gummint ownership of economic assets, not even for a little while — not banks, car companies, or anything else! Good thing they didn’t get their way during the Great Depression, or we’d all be speaking Japanese now.
If you asked the typical Republican — especially one from outside the Pacific Northwest — why the Columbia River dams were built, he’d say, “Why, to make electricity, of course.” He’d be wrong.
The dams — which were funded by, and are still owned by, the federal government — were built to make jobs, not electricity. They were Depression-era make-work projects. The irrigation water and electricity they produce were incidental; in fact, the government pracically gave away the water and electricity.
Commencing at 7 a.m. Hawaii time, December 7, 1941, the United States suddenly needed vast quantities of electricity to run aluminum plants and nuclear reactors. By fantastic good luck, the U.S. happened to have a huge source of surplus electricity, and not only that, it was under government control. That electricity produced the aluminum that made the airplanes that won the war … and also created Seattle’s post-war Boeing economy. It also ran the Hanford reactors that made all of our nation’s plutonium; arguably the war would have been won without the A-bombs, but there’s no denying the strategic importance of America’s nuclear arsenal during the 50-year Cold War that followed.
Well, that’s SOCIALISM for ya — this SOCIALISM won World War 2 and possibly prevented World War 3. Damn SOCIALISM!
Like I said, if the anti-government free-market fanatics had gotten their way in the ’30s, we would have lost the war (not much doubt about that; as it was, it was a near thing) and full employment would have taken the form of slave labor camps instead of the prosperity of the ’50s and ’60s.
Years later, Bush was right to save the banks and car companies, and Obama was right to follow up on those policies, but don’t tell that to the wingnuts. They’d rather have 25% unemployment than any gummint interference with “free” markets.
Which is why nobody in his right mind votes for Republicans.
@11
My initial hunch was that it would be near a sea vessel loading dock. After briefly skimming the Tacoma port, I hopped down to Vancouver and found that first location.
Curious about what type of operation it was, I did a google maps “what’s here” search to find the address of the land. A google search of the address revealed it was a Vanalco aluminum plant.
After wasting a little time barking up the wrong tree, I did a google maps search for aluminum mills in Washington. The Mead mill was the first result listed. Bingo.
Nowhere near the coast after all, but my close call gave me the clues I needed. Since finding it, I have come across a few references that the Mead plant has been closed down for years. In my rush to post the answer, I didn’t notice the empty parking lot.
When I was in grad school, back in the (gulp) first half of the 80s, one of the big projects in the biostatistics and environmental health departments was an “historical cohort” study of Washington’s aluminum smelters. The idea was to search through many years of employment records to identify workers, then try to locate those guys in the present (and into the future) to find out about their health.
The records had extensive information on which part of the plant they worked in, when, and how long. There were measurements available regarding exposure levels by job type and time. It was a big multivariate database, and they were trying to general “person-years” of exposure as well as lifetime loads of toxics. Interviews with the workers and/or their families gave information on health behaviors (nicotine and alcohol, mainly) and other individual factors.
All that info would then be related to disease history, hopefully producing a model of the effects of the awful stuff the smelters spewed out. Clearly, there was lots of damage to lots of workers … and that’s a big piece of why those smelters are almost all closed down.
@5
Good win!!
And for some extra credit, I had initially cropped this image, but then changed my mind and did the image above because I thought it would be too hard (for a clue, it’s also in the Spokane area)…
@15
Extra credit:
http://binged.it/yaJGMC
@16
Nice,
Did you find that by looking around, or did you find a way to Google for it?
@17
The Spokane area clue was my only help. I simply zoomed way out in birds eye view and looked for big patches of dirt in the landscape.