Search Results: Construction Materials
The Port of Redwood City is the only deepwater port in southern San Francisco Bay. It developed as early as the 1850's, as a loading area further up Redwood Creek for the redwood trees that were harvested from the hills, and taken up to San Francisco as construction...
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the first major nuclear waste disposal facility to be built in the United States, and so far also the only one. This Department of Energy (DOE) facility east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, is a final disposal site for government-...
The town of Times Beach was disincorporated, evacuated and bulldozed in the mid 1980's, after it was discovered that much of the towns roadways and parks were constructed with contaminated dirt. The contamination came from a pesticide plant, owned by Syntex...
One of two major quarries on the shores of the Bay, the Dutra quarry, unlike the Desilva quarry at the Dumbarton Bridge, has direct water access, and most of the materials are shipped by barge. The quarry supplies rock and pavement products for construction projects...
Biltmore Estate is the largest private home in America. This monstrous edifice and cultivated grounds is on the scale of a European royal palace, built in the style of a Loire Valley chateau, crossed with a few English estates. It has 33 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65...
Oak Ridge is a massive government laboratory complex and nuclear material processing plant constructed first during the Manhattan Project. Facilities constructed at the time included the largest building in the world, used to create a "mere" 100 pounds of Uranium 235...
The California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (Cal-Earth), promotes and explores the use of simple, "earth" material for building construction, such as adobe and ceramics. Based on the principles of the architect Nader Khalili, known for his ceramic buildings...
In 1986 when the Vertac Chemical company went bankrupt and the executives skipped town, they left a heavily contaminated facility, including 30,000 barrels of toxic waste. Located on the site of the WWII-era Arkansas Ordnance Plant, the company worked with numerous...
A 25-acre earthen promontory built for the Southern Crossing Bridge (which was never constructed) is now Heron's Head Park, so named because its shape resembles the head of a heron. The incompleted bridge project, dating from the 1960's, was going to retrieve more bay...
Located in Livermore, California, adjacent to the Lawrence Livermore National Lab Complex, this Sandia facility employs about 1,000 people. It was established in 1956 to support Lawrence Livermore's nuclear testing program (Sandia Lab, based at Kirtland Air Force Base...
The Fore River Shipyard, south of Boston, is a major shipyard that has been relatively inactive for the past couple of decades, but is one of the last remaining heavy industry sites in the State. During World War II it was one of several yards around Boston building...
A 90-foot white statue of Mary, Mother of Jesus, located on a 8,510 foot mountain, looming over the vast open pit mines of Butte. The statue, which is lit up at night, was constructed by volunteers using donated materials, and was completed in 1985.
Recently constructed by the Department of Energy on the edge of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, HAMMER (formerly known as the Hazardous Materials Management and Emergency Response Training and Education Center) is an 80 acre training site full of realistic props to...
The Aluminum Corporation of America (Alcoa) opened this central Washington aluminum plant in 1952, one of several smelters the company operates in the United States. Washington produces more aluminum than any other state, a situation which started in World War Two when...
A picturesque ghost town in southern Nevada, in the Bullfrog gold mining district, with a split identity as a contemporary sculpture park. The ghost town has a number of multi-story facades still standing from the heyday of the town, which was around 1910, when the...
The largest granite quarries in the world, they say, and possibly in fact (as it all depends on how you measure them), are in Vermont, around the town of Graniteville, south of Barre. Granite has been quarried here since the 1820s, but it took the railway, coming later...
The Church of Spiritual Technology built and operates an underground repository near Trementina, in eastern New Mexico. The construction of the facility began in the mid 1980s, and includes a large house, a runway, and a vault to contain the archived material of the...