Store Roof

The roof of one of the stores buildings at Wangi Power Station has failed across part of its span, the corrugated iron panels lifted or peeled away from the timber structural framing beneath. From inside the store, the failure shows as gaps of open sky framed by the surviving roof structure. Rainwater has worked into the building through the gaps, staining the timber ceiling battens and corroding the steel of the shelving below. The structure that supports the roof is still essentially intact: the steel trusses and the timber purlins are in place. The cladding above them is what has gone. Daylight floods through the openings unevenly, falling across the shelving in narrow bands.

Maintenance on stores buildings at a working power station is a low-priority job that gets done only as the operating plant allows. After Wangi closed at the end of 1986, no maintenance was carried out on any of the ancillary buildings. The stores roof in this photograph has been failing slowly across the years since. The 2017 site fire damaged parts of the complex but is not the cause of this specific roof failure, which is the standard pattern of progressive weather damage on an unmaintained corrugated-iron roof on the lake shore. The interior is exposed to the weather now.