Amherstburg, Ontario is a small town of 13,000 people - a place which I always thought was a weird location for such a humongous chemical plant.
Now it all makes sense though.
Around the turn of the century, the quarries around here began supplying Delray's Solvay Process Company with local crushed stone because of its calcium rich composition. This calcium rich stone is mixed with brine to form Soda Ash (according to the Solvay Process). Soda Ash (sodium carbonate (Na2CO3)) is a key chemical in the production of soap, glass, fabrics & paper; as well as being widely used for water softener, adjusting pHs in pools & removing flesh from bone in taxidermy.
Anyway, WWI would come along & Canada grew concerned because of its dependency on Great Britain for soda ash. Amherstburg was an obvious location for a soda ash plant - especially as there were also nearby brine pools about 5 miles away.
The plant was built & running within 2.5 years.
In the next 30 years, it would grow to employ 1000 people & also begin calcium chloride (road salt) production. It would produce 300,000 tons of soda ash in 1958 and it would soon after produce hydrofluoric acid (pharmaceutical uses) as well.
In 1989, Honeywell split up the property & sold the calcium chloride + soda ash sections to General Chemical (Honeywell kept the hydrofluoric acid section). General Chemical mustn't have been doing their homework though, as a place in Green River, Wyoming found soda ash rich deposits in 1986. These deposits were far cheaper to mine for soda ash, than it was to produce soda ash through the Solvay process.
General Chemical would stop their soda ash production in Amherstburg in 2001 & they filed for bankruptcy in 2005.
This size of this place was astounding. The first building we entered still had packages of soda ash & neatly stacked pallets. You could hear the Honeywell trains dinging beside the building, as they were being moved for some reason.
The next building was one of those interconnected tangle of pipes & tubes, where my simple self had no idea what to make of it.
The offices were exciting in terms of the pristine state in which they were left. In reading the research articles for this post, people could read the writing on the wall, but there wasn't any long-term plan where the workers were told when the plant would close.
The great part about the next building was the chemical labs. I'm a huge fan of chemistry (sorry about the long intro), so I was in heaven in terms of inspecting all of the glassware & literature.
The only thing that chapped my ass was that they had cleaned up all of the powder beakers which Donnie had photographed on a previous trip.
^I actually know what these do!
These things separate particles of different sizes. They all have different size holes & you put your compound in the top one & attach the bowls to a glorified paint mixer - which shakes the bowls & sorts out the particles by size!
Next up was the tallest section - which has to be something like 10 stories.
The views from the top were spectacular.
Outside of Windsor, there aren't many structures in Essex County which would provide these kind of county views.
Detroit! 26 kilometres away!
We hit a few more buildings in search of something else.
Although a bunch of road salt wasn't what I was looking for, this building ranks high in terms of sights which I've beheld as a result of this activity (even if my crummy picture doesn't show how strange this building was, in terms of all-white mounds, weird patterned roof & vast emptiness).
As we moved into what I'd consider the main building, it looked like their boiler was running a little cold.
While Donnie captured the control room, I grew really bored & took to more extensively searching to kill the time (I was tired & ready to go by now as it was one of those unbearably muggy summer days).
...but this is where I came upon the General Chemical caboose! Boom!
This was only after I walked into a blacksmith room & looked through a small window to discover this caboose room.
The room was tiny & therefore my point+shoot was having trouble with the limited amount of space though.
In 2009, the provincial government reached a solution with the parent company of the bankrupt General Chemical to clean up this property at the cost of $20 million. That cost has sky-rocketed to $64 million more recently, and there still didn't seem to be any significant demolition.
That is until I was recently back in Ontario, where I was told that this place is mostly flattened except for a few minor outbuildings.
The gettin' was good while it was still available to be got.