Christmas at Acme

The best way to take advantage of a ruined holiday is to spend it doing something that you enjoy. I think that most people don’t have something they enjoy enough to just sit and do it for hours, with no other stimulation and only yourself as company. I slept poorly, drank too much and my guts were in disarray all day long on Christmas eve. Better still, I woke up and my heat wasn’t working and it was about 10F outside. One million reasons to bemoan the loss of time with my family, the bad weather, how I was feeling and the sorry state of the dump I live in. But instead I brewed some coffee and packed my bag for a day at Acme.

It was a cold ride out there but if you can’t withstand 15 minutes of punishment that you are doomed in this life. Especially when there is a hell of a jackpot waiting for you. I walked 8000 steps and spent almost three hours at the plant. I revisited the BP plant for the first time in months and checked a bunch of things off my list. Here is the list – below I will elaborate on each item.

• Got inside the main office 2nd floor
• found more videotapes
• pulled a load of documents out to be scanned
• went back up to the larry car port and shot a video of the whole process, step by step
• got underneath battery #1

It’s nice to have a rope (or hose, in this case) to help steady yourself as you ‘walk the plank’, but not knowing how (or if!) this thing is fastened makes it a bit difficult. But all you can do is trust. Very proud of this photo considering the perspective it is taken from – I made it! The 2nd floor is quite clean and holds a ton of paperwork pertaining to the BP plant. I grabbed plenty and I’ll be back for more before long. It seems like people have been on the top floor as the windows are all broken out, but I can’t see how that would be possible. I’ll have to ponder that one.

I found two videotapes in another BP plant building (the one with the partially collapsed roof behind the main office). One of them was intact but literally caked in dirt and had a label that just said ‘VOLCANO’. The other was just the spools, some cretin had smashed the cassette. No problem – I’m a certified VHS doctor at this point. Worse yet, the tape was broken, initially I could not even find the take up reel. I figured I’d just steal one from another cassette but then I found it nearby, partially smashed.

I disassembled the ‘Volcano’ tape. Used a papertowel and a bunch of cotton swabs to get out as much filth as possible. The tape door broke off at the plant but that isn’t needed. One of the five standoffs cracked off when disassembling so it got put back together with only 4 screws. I got it playing and watched about 15 seconds and saw it was just a movie. The quality was terrible but ironically I don’t know if that can be attributed to the dirt and debris I cleaned out. I think this might actually be a bootleg. Once the director name flashed in the credits I stopped the tape (no need to fill my player with more dirt than needed) and did some Google research. Yes that’s right – it is the movie ‘Volcano’ with Tommy Lee Jones from 1997. Oh well, still good practice on my repair skills.

Which I’d need desperately for tape #2. The reels were filthy and the takeup reel was cracked. I sort of snapped it back into place and cleaned everything as best I could. I cut the ends of the tape square and spliced them back together with Scotch tape. I got them into the ‘Volcano’ cassette and queued it up. Unfortunately, it was not an Acme-centric recording but it is interesting (and it isn’t a Tommy Lee Jones movie).

The full video is about 5 minutes long. I did some research on the company and found Actin Inc. in East Chicago Indiana, just down the road. Better yet, I found this (click the image to visit the site):

The most interesting thing about this is that all sources say the plant closed in 2001. According to the EPA, Acme did not clean up very well when they left. To me, this says that Jack Garzella (the division manager) was still on the payroll after the plant was shut down, doing his best to button the place up. Very interesting and an important part of Acme history.

I don’t have an exact count on how many documents I pulled out of there but….I have a ton. I also grabbed quite a bit of BP related docs, I need to continue to grab more, the Document Archive is starting to become a bit heavy with Oven docs. Still yet to find much in the way of coal handling but fingers crossed. Here is a breakdown of what I have to scan.

• Winterization checklists (18 pages)
  • 1990
  • 1991
  • 1992
  • 1996
  • 1997
  • 1998
  • 2001
• Memo (1 page)
• Manpower/OT reports (9 pages)
• Checklists
  • Skyjack (2)
  • Pusher (3) (very exciting as I only had quench car and door machine previously)
  • Door machine (1)
• Daily time reports (8 pages)
• Bustle pipe repairs (25 pages – interesting hand written report from BP which includes physical photos which are taped to the notebook paper the report is written on!)
• Wilputte oven wall inspection report (11 pages – This was an entire binder, I grabbed only the first few chapters before it got really technical)
• Oven history (9 pages)
• JSAs (46 new pages – some of these go back to the mid 1970s and reference Jack Garzella as oven manager)

Also found a few documents that are too weird to post in the Document Archive so here they are.

Probably the most proud of this video of all of those I have shot. Really bright sun today which made for excellent lighting. Wanted to document this really well in the hopes it helps someone else sometime.

When I got on site today, I wandered around southwest of the quench station for a while since there are so many open acres that I never have looked at. Not much to see but some serious debris piles from structures that were torn down. I was wandering around battery #1 and noticed something on the north side. I have never really walked over there but there was clearly an accessible door to get underneath the battery!

I was down there very quickly. I kind of caught myself about 10′ inside the door, thinking “do I really want to do this?”. Acme can be a scary place but this is the next level. You are underground and it is DARK. I did bring a flashlight but in the extreme cold the light was a bit dim. Somehow, I wasn’t that scared after a moment. The intense quiet made my ears ring. I shot some photos and took one video and got out of there. The signs marking the oven numbers are really cool.

When I got out, I ran over to battery #2 to see if there was a door on the south side. Like the rest of the battery, it is just piles of bricks. Presumably there is an entrance if you want to start moving a few hundred pounds of bricks out of the way. That might make an interesting project, just to throw a few bricks out of the way every time I visit and maybe eventually I’ll find the door. Definitely going to go back to battery #1 with a very strong light so I can walk the entire length back toward the coal bunker (oven B25 I would imagine). That is a long walk in VERY dark conditions. Scary but I feel obligated to do it. Anyone who can get a selfie next to the B25 sign is a man in my book. I’m still a boy – for now!

I took the under battery footage and some other random stuff that didn’t make it into the youtube video above and edited it all together, below.