2005 09, CO

2005 09 17-18 Alamosa CO

I had intended to be out on the dunes this morning, but it was windy already before the sun came up, and I didn't want to deal with blowing sand. Instead, I was able to track down the owner of the old Public Service Corporation power plant in Alamosa. This plant has been out of service for at least 25 years, and is now being gutted buy the current owner. When it was running it supplied all the power used in the entire San Luis Valley.

It only took a couple of phone calls to find the owner, and he was very happy to let me in and show me around. He doesn't know what he is going to do with the structure, but is removing all the heavy equipment as a "winter project". According to him it is easier to find labor in the winter, people to run the cutting torches and haul things out.

The owner described the interior of the building as "Gothic", and I really liked that description. It must have been even more so before the generators and other equipment were removed. As it is the place is quite spooky.

The plant looks like it was built in two phases, the first phase being a three boiler coal fired plant, and the second being gas fired. Only one of the very large boilers on the coal fired side is intact, the other two having been mostly cut up and removed. The gas side of the plant is almost intact, although the actual generating equipment has been partially dismantled.

It will be interesting to get back into this plant to see what's been done through this coming winter.

I spent one long day and then another half day inside the plant photographing. It's a lot of material.

Here are a few exterior shots.

The first two shots are taken of the newer "gas" side of the plant. The third is the location where the interface to the power distribution system used to sit. The fourth shot is the rear of the plant, showing the older brick coal fired part of the facility. And the last two shots are from the roof, one looking west, and the next looking northeast at Blanca Peak, the 4th highest peak in Colorado. If you look carefully at the horizon, just over the white building at the left in the last photo, you can see the dunes in the Great Sand Dunes National Park. They are probably about 25 miles away.

Here are some shots of the generator room in the old coal fired part of the plant. Unfortunately the generators are already gone.

The three generators sat over the large openings in the platform. There was a coal fired boiler behind each. They would be to the right in the first photo, or straight ahead in the second. The last (bottom right) photo is taken in the center of the plant, generators on the upper level to the right, coal fired boilers to the left.

The first shot in the next group is looking through the "hall" between one of the boilers on the left and the other two on the right. At the back wall is (was) the machinery that took coal, pulverized it, and forced the powdered coal into the boilers combustion chambers. The next two shots are where this pulverization machinery lived. The mechanism sticking out of the brick walls is the remains of the equipment that forced the powdered coal in. The bottom three shots are of the mostly cut up remains of two of the boilers. All of the pipes that have been cut off were completely embedded in fire brick

Here are some more shots of the cut up boilers. All this piping carried water (really super heated steam) that was used to run turbines that would spin the generators. The cut up pipes look like the remains of a very strange pipe organ.

More of the cut up boilers. The raised floor in the middle shot below is the floor of the combustion chamber for one of the boilers. There was machinery between that floor and the window behind it to force powdered coal in for burning. The brick walls of the boiler are of course gone.

A few general interior shots of the coal side of the plant.

Here's the gas side of the plant. This is probably 20 years newer than the coal side of the plant, and a lot more complex. But the fundamentals are the same - boil water, produce superheated high pressure steam, spin a turbine, spin the generators. The boiler on the gas side of the plant is visible in the rightmost shot in the top row below.

All of the complex machinery and piping in the bottom right shot below regulated the flow and combustion of the gas burned here.

Here are some more shots of the gas side of the plant. The green cylinder is the generator, now frozen and partly cut up. I am sure there is a lot of copper inside. I am not positive, but I think the chamber shown in the middle and right shot in the bottom row is a pressure vessel that contain steam that drive the turbine that spun the generator. The turbine is to the right of the generator in the bottom left shot.

And finally here are a couple of shots of the mostly cut up pressure vessel.

I thought shooting in this plant was very cool. I only wish I had thought to try and get in before the deconstruction started. The plant has been sitting idle and empty for at least 25 years and I have driven by it many times.

I tried to duplicate in these digital shots some of what I shot on film, but not in all cases.

After a day and a half in this plant I left Alamosa, spent a couple of hours enjoying a soak in the hot springs at the north end of the valley, and then drove up to the color management and printing class at Anderson Ranch.