Near the north end of Boeing Field is the old Georgetown Steam Plant. This is an old power station that was decommissioned decades ago. I had been curious to see what it was like inside. I had thought about going a while back and then the pandemic put paid to any visits for a couple of years. The opening hours have now been established and they open on the second Saturday of each month. That proved problematic for a while as that clashed with travels or other plans. Consequently, I put the first opening in my calendar and tried my best to make sure I could go.
The Saturday came around and it was a gloriously sunny day. This shouldn’t matter much since I was going to be indoors but it does make for a nicer day to be out anyway. It was due to open at 10am so I decided to get there right at the beginning. Turned out this was a good idea. The parking lot was already looking pretty full and more were arriving. I have no idea why it was so busy. Sure, a nice day encourages people to go out but how many people see a sunny day and think “let’s go to a decommissioned power plant”? I asked a docent whether this was normal. He said they normally get about 30 people over the day and they had four tours of 50 people booked plus those, like me, that didn’t take the tour!
The power plant was built at the beginning of the 20th century. It had three steam turbines of different vintages, powers and technologies. The first two are vertical and the third horizontal. These are fed from a large boiler room. There are balconies with the control electronics which you can see but are not yet accessible. I was happy to let the tours concentrate people in various locations which meant it was quieter wherever they weren’t so I could wander around casually.
I had figured wide angle was going to be my friend in the building so had a wide zoom and a fisheye zoom with me. I used the fish a little initially but soon concluded it wasn’t that useful to me so I swapped it out with the 70-200 to allow me to get some detail shots of the machinery. Older machinery has a lot of character with polished metals, complex mechanisms and multiple gauges. It is a great look in to a bygone era.
These shots are few of the overall layout of the building. There are some details from within the plant that will have their own posts to come so I can focus on them. I don’t want to try and squeeze it all in to one post and lose some of the curious elements in the larger story.
