Zona Alfa - History Inspiration

Original Draft 2020-08-13

I've said before amongst my gaming sphere that something that i like about 'the hobby' is the variety of things that it exposes you to.

Painting, sculpting, 3d modelling, 3d printing, drawing, writing... off the top of my head and that doesn't even touch on the gaming/strategy aspect.

Another side aspect is that it can give you, if not an interest in, then at least an appreciation of topics you might otherwise be unlikely to explore; architecture, geography, politics, farming, mining, power generation...

Away

So the last couple of weekends i've been 'away', helping my partner's father move from house to house.

This is around the Wangi area, pronounced "whon-gee", not "wang-gi". Plus the place (like copious other Australian place names) is a double name, "wangi wangi" (repeat pronunciation lesson above twice) though everyone just says... "wangi".

I'd been here before, not recently, not often, it's quite pretty and fairly standard for a quasi-coastal town (it's on a lake not a coast technically).

This time as we drove into town it was difficult not to notice (and also become fascinated by) the big ol' incongruous smoke stacks rising out of the coastal escarpment.

During the week i did some bare minimum research, care of wikipedia and googlemaps...

"wangi power station

construction: 1949-1960

operational: 1956-1986

once the largest in the state"

I'm sure real history is all available for people actually interesting is that kind of thing (people, not me), your megawatt output, people employed, coal consumed on a daily basis, yada yada...

Based on a rough map calculation the main building looks to be around 250 metres long. In the pic above it's sitting diagonally on the left half of the map.

Guessing Wangi Creek (running out into lake macquarie) has appreciated the lack of effluent since the shutdown.

Strikingly this bad boy initially appears to be of red brick construction - i guess now days we're more familiar with concrete, metal, glass... and brick megaliths like this are a real visual anachronism.

This morning just for fun (and as i was doing a coffee and breaky run) i did a lap around the streets around it. There are lots of fences and 'warning/don't come in' signs all around the place, though i noticed on googlemaps that someone did a nice 'inside' shot... thank you whoever you are...

quite large, and a lot of (hidden from the outside) concrete structure, i'm not sure if the brick is just facade or if that's a different section...

anyway, it's curious to see the bones of this decaying dinosaur of a building.

apart from being a power station (coal not nuke) and big ol' buildings, there's no link to the ZA hobby aspect, this one being operational for 20 years before construction even started on chernobyl. looks like it would be a fun place to play some paintball (if our nanny state actually allowed such activities).

Just some pics from my drive about...

Although these pics were chosen because the station was clearly in view, the area is quite hilly and on the 'ups' it seems ever present as you're driving through the town.

I can only assume the locals breathed a slightly cleaner sigh of relief when the plant shut down - old coal and all.   There are actually a number of operational coal powered stations in this region (though far further from these residential areas) and as you're going about your day to day there's not like a foggy pall or smell or anything. As much as we hate pollution, we do love electricity (this blog proudly brought to you by... electricity), and i'm sure the current ones are orders of magnitude better in all areas of consideration than the old ones.

I noticed a rather large gap knocked out of the fence and i assume a bmx or motorbike trail through there might be fun for the locals. There's no high tech security or anything, probably more to keep people from getting hurt and suing rather than any risk to the building - a triumph for today's oh&bs world.  Based on the all the shit-face-scum-bag taggers leaving their crap on the inside of the building (pics above) it's clearly not hard to get in to.

Given a high unlikelihood of finding any interesting artifacts inside, and the coffee/bacon and egg rolls getting cold, I decided against an expedition into the exclusion zone. 

I most definitely won't be modelling a replica of it for gaming terrain, but it was interesting to find something like this so close to 'suburbia'. Not the kind of thing you usually find in the sydney metro urban sprawl anyway.

Until next time...