Kate Lore

This photo is a panoramic scan taken of the former DuPont Potomac River Works which today runs only Fasloc, rock bolt resin. The old smokeless powder screen houses sit silently in the background right.

The tall structures in the background have to do with "soda," more correctly sodium nitrate. The soda was brought to the wharf in a soda boat -- a steamer carrying sodium nitrate. The nitrate was lifted from the wharf to the soda storage and dry, the tall tepee-like building to the left. The structure on the top is there the soda carrying gondolas were tip and the soda dropped into the dosa house. A telpherage is not all that different from a ski-lift.

This photo shows the remnants of #3 Hall machine after the fire and explosion at the plant in January 1947. This view is from the top of the rail-side barricade, looking back into what once was #3 Hall machine.

This is the Acid Office at the DuPont Works explosives plant.

Robin Rieck is having coffee on a snowy morning, his leg propped up on a radiator, elbow on Don Schellberg's desk.

Note the grating on the windows, especially on the one to the right. This grating was to suppose to contain flying glass if one of the buildings detonated. As mentioned earlier, some of the worst injuries are from flying glass in an explosion.

Donald E. Schellberg, or just Don, was the last Acid Area Superintendent at DuPont Works. He has a long history with DuPont, having been at Beaumont, Texas, at the acrylonitrile facility, but mostly within the explosives plants. He was Powder Line Superintendent at DuPont Works before moving to Beaumont. Later he was Powder Line Superintendent at Louviers Works, before coming to DuPont Works to take over from Nick D'Arcy

This is the Biazzi nitrator under way at DuPont Works in a photo taken in 1970.

Nitroglycerin is inside the transparent glass. The separator is the metallic saucer below.

The two concrete structures in the distance are smokeless powder screening houses. After the Carney's Point disaster of 1971, where seven works were killed during an accidental detonation, smokeless powder screening and drying were transferred to Potomac River.

The photo was taken in October, 2008, of the houses as they look today.

This photographs is from Van Gelder's "History of Explosives."

The mixer is like that in a black powder plant with the large wheels.

The buggy to the left near the walls in an "angel buggy." The can hold nitroglycerin. The box at the adjacent workman's feet is for the dynamite once it is mixed.

This photograph is taken of the front of the Biazzi nitrator at DuPont's Barksdale Works. Unlike the Louviers and DuPont Biazzis, the drowning tank is enclosed and not visible.

Coleman DuPont was more interested in politics than in building the Du Pont Company, and yet it were not for him, the elder du Ponts probabably would have been more reluctant to turn the firm over to the young cousins.

Plagued by illnesses, Coleman did not excercise as much control as he might otherwise have, given that he was the President of DuPont after the three relatively young cousins acquired rights to the firm in 1902. Luckily, Pierre and Alfred seemed to manage the firm duing Coleman's absenses, especially Pierre who was the Treasurer.

This photo is of the Barksdale Works, the first of the "modern" dynamite factories build during the expansion of 1904, two years after the three DuPont cousins -- Coleman; Pierre; and Alfred -- took over from the old guard.

Construction was authorized and started in 1903 by a team of engineers who formed the nucleus of DuPont's Engineering Department.

Owing to the personality of Hamilton Barksdale and the interpersonal relationship between the "dynamite boys" (more accurately "hi-ex") and the rest of the firm, the Barksdale works started to rival Eastern Laboratories at Repauno.

This photo is taken of a typical Neutralizer House of DuPont construction. This is nothing like the building in the photo in the prior blog. Although there is a lot of "oil" (N.G., or nitroglycerin) in the house, it is not being handled in the way shown in the Separator House photograph.

The nitroglycerin is washed with water containing bicarbonate of soda to neutralize trace acid and then to make the pH of the nitroglycerin slightly alkaline.

Using ammonium to neutralize the traces of spent acid, or having the pH too alkaline (in excess of 10) can lead to nitroglycerin instability.

This is a strange building, indeed. In "The History of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company," published in 1912 by Business America (reprint ISBN 1-55918-057-9), the author speaks of a Separator House, shown in this old photo. The author goes to great length in explaining how the spent acid and nitroglycerin went through an after-separation step.

This building does not resemble the neutralizers typical of powder plants of the 1930s.

Fort Nisqually was located far south of Tacoma, and not at Point Defiance, where the buildings stand today. The Fort was not a military installation, but a place for trading and was set up by the Hudson's Bay Company, which pulled out of the area once the border dispute between the United States and Canada was peacefully settled in the 1850s. The area which it today's Washington State would be United States territory. Today's British Columbia would be Canadian. Back in the 1850s, this was yet to be defined.

The Acid Area did not have a major injury from the late 1940s until the day the plant closed. This photo, taken in the autumn of 1971, right outside the Acid Change House tallies the days.

Donald Schellberg, Acid Area Superintendent, once remarked that the injuries from the powerful acids were as terrible as from accidental detonation, and also more difficult to prevent, given the fact the acids were more ubiquitous in that they were constantly being pumped and moved in large amounts relative to the nitroglycerin.

Number One Pack House from a photo no longer available on the web.

Looking at Google Earth, it would appear the mounds in which the Potomac River Works machinery was located, are still there. The front mound once hosed the cartridging machines. The second set are the mix houses. The one to the right is the double mix house that shot in January, 1970 -- the double mix house.

The third berm, smaller than those in the foreground,, beyond the road, is the neutralizer house. The berm in the distance is where the Biazzi was located.

The white squares are the chimneys which would direct the blast upward if there were an accidental detonation.

What really happened after the three du Pont cousins took the reins of the firm.

The switch was from black powder to dynamite, and oddly enough, the firm that was to become the king of the dynamite companies was among the last to go to market, but then they did, they went in big.

______________

The photograph is of an old-style batch nitrator building surrounded by a Repauno-style barricade.

The only real way to tell when this photo of the works laboratory was taken, is to look at the background -- in this case the old nitric acid area where sodium nitrate and sulfuric acid were combined in cast iron.

Other than that, the photo could have been taken almost any time.

The door to the right led to a hallway. To the immediate right was the Acid Superintendent's Office. Slightly to the left was the Acid Supervisor's Office (later the Chief Chemist's Office).

The small porthole was the head (restroom).

Number 3 Hall Machine has "gone missing," to put it mildly. The building and content, virtually identical to number 4 hall in other photographs, has been blown to pieces.

Number 2 Talley, in the distance beyond the barricade in the foreground, is marked only the by barricade.

This was the last building that shot at the DuPont Works. It was without loss of life ... the last incident until the plant shut down, 29 years later.

The Panic of 1907 was an unwelcome shock to the financial community, Wall Street, and the DuPont Company.

Acid area in the foreground at DuPont Works. The AN crystallizer can be seen in the distance across the ravine. Circa 1926.

Looking from the Power House, across the plant, in the far distance -- top center, the building with the dormers -- is the Main Office as it looked in the 1920s. Like much of the plant, it remained virtually unchanged until the plant closed.

In another DuPont history site, this building was mis-identified as the "DuPont Hotel." Not so.

Looking closely at the main office, there is a chimney on the right corner of the Main Office building. This provided a fireplace in the Works Manager's (nee, Works Superintendent's) office.

From a series of still photos of the original, the original now at the DuPont town museum, this is a "stitched" photograph of the families that showed up at the DuPont picnic at American Lake on July 18, 1923 -- as of this writing, 85 years ago.

This image is within the (Repauno style) barricade within Three Hall (dynamite cartidging machine). The wheels in the foreground belong to a narrow gauge railroad flatcar that was used to move ("truck") powder. The operators who moved powder from the mixers to the cartridging machine were called truckers.

Ole had been in the laboratory since the 1950s and had provided continuity as the fresh new chemists came in, and went on to other work. He, along with dozens of others, held the pieces of history in their heads -- how did something happen? When? Why? What outcome? Same details like the fact that when Number Two Talley caught fire and exploded, the mixer was running Master Mix, a short step away from a dynamite called "Ditching."

If a nitrator shot, DuPont or competitor, another plant would send Master Mix, 50% nitroglycerine in 50% absorbents (dopes).

Flames shot hundreds of feet from the Talley Mix House and ignited a powder buggy inside the barricade a number 3 Hall Machine. Number 3 Hall Machine blew up seconds after the Talley Mix House.

The wooden building outside the barricade and to the left of the narrow gauge rail line is the Heater House -- it is literally where the building's heating unit was housed, although there was no air conditioning.

In 1947, Number Two Talley Mix House caught fire and detonated.

Ole Solum, Works Laboratory Technician, tells part of the tale, in what are a series of inspired quotes:

They were running Master Mix. The operator on the upper deck of Two Talley Mix House was working the rake on the dry ingredients, and a fire started.

George "Skinny" Jorgensen, Powderline Foreman, continues.

The guy on the top floor saw the fire and started to yell, "fire!" There were only two of them, and they got out of the building.

Although obscured by the Repauno barricade of number 3 Hall Machine, itself destroyed in an explosion, in the background is a view of number two Talley Mix House at DuPont Works, newly constructed after the accidental detonation in January 1947.