[fr] 
[es]Westport power plant
| Type | Aerial view | Country | Date | Status | Rating |
 Factory | Here ! |  USA | 2006-04-02 | Demolished | ***** |
Outside shots - Click to enlarge!
12 Monkeys Power Plant.
Built in 1906, this concrete steel and giant will not achieve one century of activity.
It was the largest power plant in the world. Located in the Baltimore bay, Maryland, the power plant was owned by Baltimore Gas and Electricity (BGE), now Constellation Power Source.
Its total capacity was 252 MW, split into 128 MW produces by steam and 124 MW by combustion turbines.
12 Monkeys tag on a wall
An efficient closing, steel plating, welded doors and windows kept vandals and looters out of this plant. Some years later, it remains an inestimable industrial heritage. Only the time left its mark. Everything remains intact. Each one the turbine halls is a real industrial cathedral.
One interesting feature is the presence of a coal delivery system on the top of one building, using a suspension railways system, hanging over some coal silos. 23 wooden wagons are still there. They open through their bottom, allowing the coal to fall directly in the silos.
The Westport power plant has been used as a filming location for the movie 12 Monkeys (1995). If the location can hardly be recognized in the movie, some tags of "The Army" still remain on the walls of the plant.
This place is now demolished, ideally located on Baltimore's bay, target of promoters. It became urgent to explore this place.
Now all the asbestos and chemicals are gone so is the fun playhouse. Heavily guarded for our own good, all the cool stuff is gone and/or unaccessable, the old rotten building is slowly coming apart to make way for fancy housing and a hotel in lovely Westport. Imagine something new and clean and useful that does not pollute the bay in Westport. I hate developers but this can only be good for B-town.
They have started to tear this place down for sure. I was thinking of going down as a last resort but there is definitely a guard who walks the street and the whole backside is smashed in. I have probably the only photos currently anywhere of this at the moment... http://www.flickr.com/photos/patgavin/sets/72157601943827598/
drove by westport the other day (last weekend) and there was wrecking machinery in the yard, fences repaired, a guard walking the street in front of it and lights on all over the building. the saddest part is the roof seeems to be gone, all windows are gone, and large pieces of metal are in the yard. how sad.
You can still get inside of this plant... although they are starting to gut it, there's still a good amount of nostalgic loot inside.
Dear A. Nonymous, Thank you for the very complete and detailed comment.
A friend and I had a chance to explore this place, what you call pistons for removing the remains of combustion are in fact stokers, as per a name plate that a friend and I found on the side. they may well have also pushed the ash out, either by a seperate system from the same crank or by pushing new coal into its place. At any rate, from what I can tell, in the older section crushed coal was raised to the railroad on an external elevator which based on covers on the coal cars actually had the cars outside. From the remaining train tracks in the yard, it looks like coal was brought in on the Western Maryland Railroad (bridge is spring garden trestle) or by barge. from the upstairs coal cars it was fed directly to the boilers through a system of chutes.The stokers pushed it in, and ash dropped directly into railcarts at the bottom which took it outside. In the newer section, the boiler burns pulverized coal and the steam pressure, fuel capacity, and other stats are recorded on a plaque on the northeast corner, as well as the companies involved and a date. There, the coal pulverisers are in the basement, it is blown in to burners to make 1100 psi (!) and goes to the turbines. I am reasonably certain that the turbines exhaust to condensers and they use the water again. the new boilers are also fitted with economizers,taking up the middle floors, which run intake water pipes through the exhaust stacks to both preheat the water and recapture energy from exhaust. I cant tell if the evaporator system was seperate or used exhaust from the new boiler. in any case,the northwest coal bunker below the conveyor belt must have fed both boiler and evaporator. The evaporators took salt water from middle branch and made it suitable for use in the boilers. If plain water were used, scale would build up too quickly. There is also what amounts to a switchboard in the northwestern section where each floor is a different phase, the basement is fuses, and the top floor is the control room. each switch is a set of 3 VERY high voltage oil break switches mechanically ganged together (one from floor a, one from floor b etc) to a switch mechanism on the top floor which has either automatic or manual control. The saltwater intake pumps are in or near a small structure sitting right on the edge of the water. Overall the place was magnificently preserved, and I thank you and other urban explorers like you for preserving the memories of these places for future generations. One bit of encouraging news is I found an environmental assessment that says the building does seem to be a candidate for reconversion instead of outright demolition. The loss of the physical plant will, nontheless, be tragic indeed. On a final note I love the way you make the transition pictures in certain areas of your site. Thank you and keep up the good work. A. Nonymous, november 2006