Collapsed Shelving

A run of steel shelving in one of the stores buildings at Wangi Power Station has collapsed, the upright frames buckled under the weight of stored parts and the corrosion of years of unmaintained occupancy. The shelves have folded forward and downward, dumping their loads onto the floor below. Cast-iron fittings, bearing housings, lengths of pipe, and a scatter of smaller hardware lie in a pile beneath the failed structure. The remaining shelving on either side of the collapse is still standing but tilted, its uprights bowed. The concrete floor below the shelving is stained where lubricants and rusted iron have leached down. Daylight falls across the wreck from a broken roof panel above.

Stores collapses at sites like this are a known consequence of long-term disuse. The shelving was designed for continuous service, with the loads checked and rebalanced as part of the routine maintenance. Once that maintenance stopped, the shelving and the building it sat inside both began to deteriorate, with the failures eventually compounding. After Wangi closed at the end of 1986, no maintenance was carried out on any of the stores buildings. The shelving in this photograph collapsed at some point in the years between closure and the present. The pile of parts beneath it is the unsalvaged residue of the plant's working inventory.