Turbine Hall Basement Looking Towards B Station

The turbine hall basement at Wangi Power Station, photographed looking toward the B Station end of the building, runs along the underside of the turbine hall floor in a long open volume. Structural columns rise in regular rows from the concrete floor; pipework hangs along the underside of the upper floor in parallel runs. The major below-floor plant has been removed: the condenser shells, the feedwater pumps, the oil coolers. What remains is the structural arrangement and the smaller-gauge tubing that was not worth the cost of removal. The light is dim, coming through small ground-level windows along the perimeter wall and through floor gratings in the upper level.

The B Station end of the basement carried the condenser and feedwater plant for the three 60 megawatt pulverised-coal units commissioned between 1958 and 1960. Each turbine had its own condenser fitted directly below its pedestal, with cooling water drawn from Myuna Bay on the lake side. After B Station closed on 31 October 1986 and formal decommissioning followed in 1989, the basement plant ran on standby for several years. The generating equipment, including the basement plant, was removed in the 1995 to 1997 program. The basement now reads as a structural shell.