Concrete Sarcophagus
Weldon Spring Site. Shot with a Fujifilm TX-1 on Kodak Portra 400.
Just a couple miles off I-64, west of St. Louis, sits what looks like a concrete spaceship that landed in a pristine prairie. This is what’s left of what was once the largest explosives factory in the U.S. and also served as a uranium enrichment plant during the Cold War. When the government finally closed the facility in 1966, they simply walked away — leaving behind one of the most toxic spots in U.S. history. The Weldon Spring Site, as it’s now called, was eventually added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list and cleanup started in the mid-1980’s. Rather than haul away the massive amount of nastiness (1.5 million cubic yards of it), they sealed it up in a concrete container that’s supposedly designed to last 1000 years.
There’s a lot of ugly history here, from how the government effectively stole the land from the previous owners, mostly small farmers, to the disgusting mess that was left behind. Here are some links if you want to dig into it more:
The photo is from the first roll of film that I shot in my new-to-me old Fuji TX-1. This camera is the twin sibling of the Hasselblad X-Pan panoramic camera. Fuji produced the camera for Hasselbad but released its own version for the Japanese market with the only difference being the Fuji’s body isn’t painted black. It shoots 35mm film in a 24x65mm format (as opposed to the 24x36mm format of normal 35mm cameras). I bought the Fuji version since it’s a lot less expensive than the Hasselblad but, except for color, is otherwise exactly the same. The image is a straight scan of Kodak Portra 400 by Indie Film Lab with no post-processing on my end.