Almost two years ago I spotted this abandoned power plant on google maps. There wasn't much info online about the plant besides the fact it had closed a few years prior. It looked completely deserted from satellite and things were looking promising. I devised a plan that would involve crossing a railroad trestle and climbing two fences.
In May of this year a buddy and I made the several hour drive out to this mysterious power plant, not knowing what to expect. We began by crossing the railroad trestle, just as I had planned. But that's where we arrived at our first problem. On the other side of the trestle on the right hand side was the power plant, but directly on the other side of the tracks were houses. With our luck we happened to come on a day where the house closest to the tracks was throwing a party, and there were at least a dozen people outside with a full view of us if we were to cross the trestle. That didn't deter us though, we army crawled the entire span of the bridge! When we reached the other end of the trestle we were practically in this person's backyard. We had a full view of everything going on. Rather than wait there for someone to spot us while we figured out what to do, we crawled down the embankment on the side of the rails through some unknown vegetation, which we hoped wasn't poison ivy. Lucky for us, it wasn't. Now we reached our next obstacle: the first barbed wire fence. Lucky for us, after walking a bit down the fence we found a small hole that we could barely fit through. I guess being skinny can come in handy sometimes. Now we were pretty much inside the property. We walked for a few minutes up to the next fence which we weren't able to find a hole in. Quickly, yet carefully, we hopped over the fence. Now we were finally able to look for an actual entrance! We began by just trying doors, however they all seemed to be welded shut. After about 15 minutes we walked over to the exterior boilers and tried more doors, but even there they were welded shut, too. We decided it would be best to go up a few floors as surely not every door could be sealed. Now, we ran into yet another problem! The stairs to get up to the next catwalks were removed. So we had to improvise. After looking for some other options for about 20 minutes, we finally found some machinery we could climb on top of and then we were able to crawl on to the catwalk. We had already been gone for about an hour and a half and still we weren't even inside. Once we were up on the next few floors, it only took us about another 10 minutes to find a door which was left open. Now, we got out our camera gear and walked inside, not knowing what was to come.
We were greeted by almost complete darkness. There were a few emergency lights on in the distance but that was all we could see. We got out or lights and started walking. There were very few windows in this plant so all the light we got was from our hand held lights. After traversing the complex hallways of the power plant we finally got down to the ground floor.
It was very eerie. I think the weirdest sight was a ladder placed underneath a freshly changed light bulb.
(bad picture, I know, this was snipped from a video clip)
Now we headed towards the turbine hall. The building was almost silent except for the background hum from the high voltage boxes scattered around the plant. When we finally reached the turbine hall we were greeted by two rather large turbines.
Also on the same floor of the turbine hall was the control room, which actually took us a while to find. Even though the plant has only been abandoned for a few years, the peeling lead paint made it seem like it had been much longer. There were actually two of these rooms pictured, each adjacent to one other.
Continuing on with our exploration we passed by several offices, most of which were seemingly untouched since it's closure.
I wish I took more pictures but I was more focused on the power station around me. Although the architecture wasn't anything incredible it was clear that this power plant was something special. It was pretty much completely unknown. All in all I spent about 7 hours from the time I left my car to the time I arrived back at it. I do plan on returning some time now that I know how long it takes to just get inside. Thanks for reading!