South East Control Room

The south-east corner of one of Shimizusawa's control rooms. The wall on the left has a rough rectangular opening cut through it, edges chipped and unpainted, the cut-line still showing the marks of whatever tool made it. The opening is wide enough to walk a turbine through, and that's almost certainly what it was for. Beyond it, daylight reaches into the next bay. The floor in front of the hole is empty. Whatever was bolted there has been removed, and the bolt holes in the concrete are the last sign it was ever here. The walls and ceiling are otherwise intact. Paint, conduit runs, and a single light fitting all survived whatever happened on the way out.

When a power plant is decommissioned, the question is what to do with the heavy machinery. At Shimizusawa, the answer was to break the building to get the machines out. Walls were cut through to make pathways for cranes and trolleys. Generators, turbines, transformers were pulled out of the rooms they had been built into and trucked off to be scrapped or sold. The rooms were left as they were after the equipment came out. The wall openings were never patched. There was no point. Nothing was going back in.