Red Gate & Ford.

This is coolbert:

Made several field trips this weekend. To see residuals, if they still exist, from the World War Two era.

Residuals, what I call them, remnants of mighty industrial and scientific ventures intrinsically related the war effort - - both occurring in the Chicagoland area. Efforts absolutely essential to war making potential of the highest order!

What is left?

1. Ford City.

Ford City shopping mall, originally the Dodge Chicago plant. That plant at one time the largest building in the world and from which the great majority of engines used to power the B-29 bomber aircraft came from. Perhaps in priority only second to the Manhattan Project the development and manufacture of the Stratofortress [B-29], a weapons system the two of which [B-29 and atomic bomb] almost go hand-in-glove.

NOT much left to see now of the original Dodge Chicago plant. That entire area now a large and well-developed shopping mall and has been for decades now.

Two items of interest however are still to be seen. Perhaps and ONLY perhaps, FLAK towers. This I observed many years ago, actually when I was a kid, and the impression has been very long lasting.

Closer examination seems to suggest and I am able to reasonably infer that THESE TOWERS MAY HAVE BEEN ACTUAL FLAK EMPLACEMENTS! Large, tall, maybe four or five stories high, with a platform on top, made very solidly with concrete and apparently thick wells of the most robust type.

I am sure those towers giving from the top a total unobstructed 360 degree view of the surroundings, unimpeded!

These towers are rather or were for water and nothing else. Maybe a combination of water tower AND flak tower combined? I am not sure but have my suspicions that at one time BOFORS 40 mm AAA guns sat atop these structures!

2. CP-2 & CP-3.

Atomic piles, nuclear reactors, Red Gate Woods, Cook County forest preserve.

Two atomic piles, nuclear reactors really, used  for research and development during the Manhattan Project. The original CP-1 as used for the first controlled fissionable chain reaction as was accomplished by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. CP-2 merely CP-1 broken down and reassembled at Red Gate Woods.

A hike back into the woods about one mile [1.6 km.] is needed, a rough path provided for daring and hardy hikers, the area abandoned to the wilderness over fifty years ago now.

Those two reactors in 1956 being merely BURIED IN SITU, COVERED WITH EARTH AND A CONCRETE LAYER ON THE SURFACE AND THAT WAS ALL. NOT UNTIL THE MID 1990'S WERE THE REMNANTS OF THE REACTORS UNEARTHED AND DISPOSED OF PROPERLY.

All that remains now is a large granite rock inscribed to say that CP-2 and CP-3 were at one time buried at this location.

What actual residual radiation exists in the ground now, plutonium and such, I cannot say. To what depth you need to go before you find radioactivity that is of dangerous sort is undetermined, if indeed any exist.

In this regard, over the many decades, earthworms may have been in an unforeseen manner primary culprits for the spreading of dangerous radioactivity? Decades and decades of earthworms ingesting and secreting the surrounding radioactive earth, moving around, the plutonium and such moving as does the earthworm?

Two comments about CP-2 and CP-3 and Red Gate Woods:

* Back in the early 1970's I can very well  recall driving by Red Gate Woods forest preserve and remember seeing ethnic persons filling their one gallon jugs with well water as pumped from the nearby picnic ground. Well water with high mineral content and thought to have medicinal properties.

* I must admit too when they clean these sites up they do a good job, as it should be done, but you do have to ask yourself - - WHAT TAKES SO LONG?

coolbert.