Success! After fumbling around outside in the rain for a few minutes, we found an unlocked door into the main building.
Quite a mess in here. The air quality was awful and it took around 4-6 seconds for any photos to expose properly. This view is looking down towards the back of the mill, in the direction of the wood shop.
Looking the opposite direction. There's a smashed bathroom to the left, an office to the right, and for some horrible reason, a bunch of cases of Stayfree maxi pads strewn amongst the wreckage.
Ooh, black mold! Awesome! Breathing in here kinda hurts, really should have brought some face masks. There's a century worth of wool dust, mold, grease, and god knows what else floating around in the air, not to mention the occasional dead and rotting birds.
The river runs right underneath one wing of the mill.
Part of the fire suppression system, I think.
Flashlight, check. Automap, check. Now where the hell are the imps?
The vines outside really, really want to get into the machine shop.
Some of the many rusty tools hanging in the machine shop.
Inside the wood shop at one end of the building.
This is probably the only room that actually had a pleasant smell to it.
Inside the wood shop, looking back the way I came.
Heading towards the other end of the building.
:smith:
Here's the office near my first entrance. If I return with gloves, I'll try getting some scans of those files.
This area overhangs the river. I didn't want to get too close to that side, the floor didn't seem terribly trustworthy.
Starting to get brighter again... the far wall of this section is missing.
Nice crumbly pillar there.
This section is visible from the bridge, so we quickly backtracked towards the elevator.
Everyone loves pitch-black, yawning elevator shafts. Not a good place to wander without a flashlight. There's a set of stairs leading down to the basement near here.
Small basement room full of steam pipes and tanks. There's a short dark tunnel leading out one end.
Tunnel under the parking lot to the basement of the boiler/furnace building.
Large turbine at the base of one of the two-story boilers. Note the wrench on the floor to the right for scale.
There's a steep metal staircase to the right, a shallow stairway to a door on the left, two towering boiler doors and catwalks directly above, and a series of claustrophobic passages that reach behind the furnace chambers ahead of me.
My lens isn't a wide enough angle to catch all of this at once.
Looking up one floor above me at the left boiler.
Detail shot at the bottom of the left boiler.
Indicator lights in the basement level of the boiler room.
Mercury switches! Hurray!
After climbing the metal ladder up to the catwalks, I could sit up here and investigate more of the nifty dials and meters.
Logo on the right boiler's door.
Text above the right boiler's doors.
There's a door to the left of here that opens into a grating-floored garage. It reeks of oil, probably due to the giant leaking tanks marked "No. 6 H.O."
The fumes started giving me a headache pretty quickly, so I headed back through the door, down the ladder, and through the incredibly dark passage that led behind the boilers at basement level.
Here's one of the little hatches that I assume leads into the furnace chamber.
The weird lighting is from taking a 15-second exposure with reflected flashlight.
This tunnel continued along past the other furnace, then opened into a taller perpendicular chamber below the garage. A light mist hung in the air as light filtered through the grating above.
The middle of this passage was blocked by a deep flooded pit with yellow rails on either side. I couldn't tell how deep it was, though it was at least deep enough to hold a sunken 6-foot ladder and several chairs.
Something seemed wrong with the perfectly still surface of the water... it looked like there were holes in it. What did the flashlight reveal?
:psypop:
Heating oil does some pretty strange things if it's allowed to sit completely undisturbed on top of water.
Getting nausea from all these fumes, I had one last look at the office room in this building before heading back through the basement tunnel again. I wondered what time it was...
Oh yeah, that's helpful.
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