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View search results on mapEnsign Bickford Aerospace and Defense develops directed energy explosives for weapons and rockets, and has been based here in Simsbury since 1837. It started in the 1830s, when William Bickford invented the safety fuse. In the 1930s, the company developed Primacord, and advanced detonator and shaped charge technology, used in atomic bombs, missiles, and rockets. In 1987, the Space Ordnance Division became the separate Ensign Bickford Aerospace Company.
This data center has been associated with NASDAQ, and is in an office park with a few other data centers, associated with Bridgewater, Digital Realty, and others. The office park has also been home to Unilever consumer products testing.
With the Electric Boat manufacturing center and the New London Submarine base just a few miles from one another on its shores, the Thames River estuary is the epicenter for American submarines. Between them, at the southern end of the navy base, is the Submarine Force Library and Museum, the institution offering the official history for underwater warfare, full of elaborate dioramas, cross-sections, full-scale weaponry including ICBMs, and more.
In 1899, pioneering electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla received $100,000 from John Jacob Astor to develop a new lighting system, but instead used the funds to establish a high voltage and high frequency lab on a remote hillside in Colorado Springs, with a direct view of Pikes Peak, a prominent mountain he claimed he would use to transmit electrical signals to Paris.
The Las Vegas Motor Speedway has one of the largest contiguous expanses of asphalt in the west, more than a full square mile of parking, which continues across the interstate with the an automotive auction lot, more than a mile long, with space for more than 10,000 cars.
The official museum about the atomic testing program, largely conducted at the Nevada Test Site, sixty miles north of Las Vegas, is just a short distance from the Strip in Las Vegas. The museum is full of interesting displays, and was established with the support of the primary contractors at the site, Bechtel, EG&G, and Wackenhut, as well as the DOE, and the national labs, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.
The Apex Regional Landfill is the main landfill for Las Vegas’ municipal waste, operated by Republic Services (the smaller of the two giant waste hauling and disposal companies operating throughout the USA). Republic Services has nearly 200 active landfills across the country, but the landfill at Apex, at more than 2,000 acres, is said to be the largest active landfill in the country.
Apex is a large industrial settlement, north of Las Vegas, without a single residential building. Highway 93 passes through an electrical production center, with four separate gas fired power plants (the Harry Allen, Silverhawk, Apex, and Chuck Lenzie generating stations), spurred into production by the Enron-compelled energy crisis, and three industrial scale photovoltaic solar power plants, one of which covers more than two square miles.
At the top of the Apex Industrial Park north of Las Vegas is the nation’s first full scale Hyperloop test site. Hyperloops, of course, are large diameter vacuum tubes, which propel pods inside them by air pressure, at very high rates of speed. Similar to the pneumatic tube system still found in some large retail operations, where small capsules are used to move cash to and from cashiers, hyperloops upsize this technology to move people, as well as goods, inside the pods.
The Western Elite Landfill, on Highway 93, the Great Basin Highway, is a major landfill for the Las Vegas region. While the big Republic pile at Apex takes household trash from the city, and is open to the public, Western Elite is, as its name implies, more exclusive, only taking industrial wastes from previously approved haulers. Though it is an hour away from the city, it is a major landfill for Las Vegas’ construction debris.
At Schellbourne, Highway 93 crosses the route of the former Pony Express trail, marked by a wayside interpretive station, and an abandoned motel. The Pony Express looms large in the myths of manifest destiny, despite being in existence for just a year and a half, between 1859 and 1861. At the time it was the state of the art for getting information across the country – a note could be passed from east coast to west in as little as ten days.
This Air Force station on Kimberly Peak near Ely was one of three in a line from Edwards Air Force Base in California, to northeastern Nevada, that served as a tracking and communication system for testing airplanes traveling at very high speeds. It was built for the X-15, capable of speeds over 4,500 miles per hour, and the A-12 spy plane, one of which crashed near Wendover, long before it was declassified. The station, operated by Edwards Air Force Base, was torn down around 2012.
This large-scale automotive test site, owned and operated by the Bridgestone Tire Company, covers nearly ten square miles. There are eight different tracks here, including a large loop track, to measure tire noise and handling at high speeds; a wet/dry course with skid pad; hydroplane pool; braking traction pad; and a 500,000-square-foot pad for testing high speed traction in exacting water conditions.
This remote mining site was once a major source of sulfur, but has been abandoned since the early 2000s. Sulfur, also known as its more biblical name, brimstone, is used to make sulfuric acid, used in great quantity in chemical industries, oil refining, and to make fertilizer, and gunpowder. It used to be mined, often hydraulically, from surface and underground deposits, and Texas was the primary producer of mined sulfur.
Since the 1920s, Amarillo has been the hub for helium production in the USA, a government monopoly due primarily to the strategic use of helium for airships used for surveillance, and other defense technologies. The region around Amarillo, and extending into southern Kansas, once produced 95% of the world's recoverable helium, at plants that extracted it from natural gas.
This beef plant, operated by Cargill, slaughters around 4,500 cows per day, producing more than three million pounds of beef, per day. It was established in 1968, and employs around 2,000 people. Cargill is one of the four major meat companies in the USA, and is the largest privately held company in the country. It manufactures a wide range of food and agriculture products, from potash to grains to French fry salt. This is one of several large Cargill beef plants.
Lake Amistad is the largest body of water in West Texas, though it is not entirely in Texas, as it is shared by Mexico. The lake formed when the Rio Grand was blocked by the Amistad Dam, which was completed in 1969. The border runs through the middle of the dam. The lake, a water supply and recreational reservoir, covers a hundred square miles of what used to be the river valley.
Most lakes in the nation are manmade, formed by dams, backing up rivers. Lake Meredith, in the eastern Panhandle of Texas, is no exception. It was formed in 1965, when the Sanford Dam was built on the Canadian River. Lake Meredith is a reservoir in an arid area, and one of the primary sources of water for Amarillo and Lubbock, which is connected to the reservoir by a 150-mile long pipeline.
Buzzi Unicem operates this cement plant and mine near the West Texas town of Maryneal. The company, based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has six other cement plants around the country. Together these plants produce around 8 million metric tons of cement per year, making Buzzi Unicem one of the largest cement companies in the nation, contributing around ten percent of the nation’s total. Most cement production in the country is done by foreign-owned companies, like Cemex and Holcim.
Located in Monahans, Texas, this five acre concrete bowl, 35 feet deep, used to have a roof, and was built in the late 1920s to store crude oil–around a million barrels worth–during the early boom years of the region. The oil leaked out through cracks, into the ground, and the tank was soon abandoned. In the 1950s it was filled with water and turned into a recreational lake, which also leaked, and was abandoned.
This carbon dioxide recovery plant is one of many in the region operated by Oxy, also known as Occidental Petroleum. Occidental is the largest carbon dioxide flooder in the Permian Basin. CO2 flooding is a technique used to get oil flowing more efficiently, by injecting the gas into the wells. The company injects more than 700 billion cubic feet of CO2 into the Permian every year.
One of five carbon black plants in West Texas, this one is owned by Cabot, a specialty chemicals company based in Boston. It has been in operation since 1926, and owned by Cabot since 1945. Carbon black is a powdery black carbon material resulting from the incomplete combustion of a heavy hydrocarbon (e.g. tar, fuel oil, etc.), in a combustion zone fueled by air and natural gas.
The Panhandle Logistics Center is one name for this transportation depot in Sunray, 50 miles north of Amarillo. It is owned by TNW, the parent company of the Texas Northwestern Railway, a shortline railway company with 151 miles of track, most of which is contained inside this square mile. Often in storage at the yard are thousands of oil tanker rail cars, as well as sections of wind farm towers and blades, which are often shipped by rail.
One of a few large automotive testing facilities in West Texas, this 5,800-acre site opened in the early 1960s, and was the primary testing grounds for BF Goodrich. In 2005 it was taken over by a consortium of private and state organizations, including Texas A&M, and is now called the Pecos Research and Testing Center. Onsite are nine separate test tracks, including a circular track that is nine miles in circumference, making it one of the largest in the country.
This beef processing plant, located between Amarillo and Lubbock, closed a few years ago, after more than four decades of operation, idling more than 2,300 workers in a town of 22,000 people. Cargill put it up for sale in 2015, and it remains shuttered. Though severe droughts in the years before the plant closed contributed to a decrease in cattle in the area, the fact is that beef consumption is decreasing in the country, being replaced by chicken and other sources of protein.
This facility, northeast of San Angelo, has been the primary proving ground for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, based in Akron, Ohio, since 1944. It covers 7,250 acres (more than 11 square miles), and has several tracks, with a total of 58 miles of roads. It is one of four large-scale proving grounds established by tire companies in western Texas.
This pipe yard near Midland is one of the largest in West Texas. It is operated by the Sooner Pipe Company, a major OCTG pipe supplier in Texas, with three regional yards: in Crosby (near Houston); in Godley (near Dallas); and this yard in Midland, serving the Permian Basin.
This is one of a few US Gypsum mines and wallboard plants in the USA. The company presented its Sheetrock brand of wallboard at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and since then it has been among the largest suppliers of gypsum-based housing products in the country. It has seven other gypsum mines (in Utah, Oklahoma, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and at Plaster City, California), and fifteen wallboard plants in the USA.
Tolk Power Plant is located 9 miles east of Muleshoe, Texas, near the western edge of the Texas Panhandle. It is home to two coal-fired units, whose combined output capacity is 1,067MW. Units 1 and 2 became operational in 1982 and 1985 respectively. The plant is owned by Xcel Energy Incorporated.
Village Farms operates some of the largest hydroponic greenhouse operations in the country at two nearby sites: here, at the Marfa Airport, and a few miles further up the road towards Fort Davis. These structures allow growers to grow tomatoes (and some cucumbers and peppers) in carefully managed conditions, without soil, by controlling temperature, irrigation, fertilizer, carbon dioxide levels, humidity, and light.