Detritus of the Move - Changing Offices at WES

In mid-2004, the laboratory where I worked moved into a new building. I managed to be out of town during the move (that was good timing!), but upon return to Vicksburg, I wandered around the old building to see what was left. It was largely junk that no one wanted to take to their nice and clean new offices - debris that probably should have been dumped a long time before. My coworkers were scientists and engineers; we are the type of people who keep stuff - forever (just in case we might need it...).

9-track tapes used with older VAX-VMS computer systems. For decades. this is how you sent data to other scientists. You have seen tape reels like this in news articles of the Gemini and Apollo space missions. 

We still used these sturdy analogue telephones. The wheel on the right is a Kodak Carousel slide tray.

The manuals on the table are for Microstation software. In the 1990s, Microstation made you buy  proprietary workstations to run their software - at extortionist prices, of course.

A particle-board ersatz wood-grain computer station. Furniture at its best.

Good debris on another example of particle-board furniture. Definitely not worth moving.

That was a good Scotch tape dispenser!

Compared to the 9-track tapes, here we have "modern" data storage media: compact disks (CDs). The CD was originally developed as a music media to replace LP records, and a CD of about 640 mbytes could include the entire contents of Symphony 9 by Beethoven in uncompressed format.

More of the Microstation manuals and the proprietary Microstation keyboard. This software was used for bathymetry charts and analysis of sounding data. 

Trash is often interesting. Here we have Polaroid instant 35mm film and boxes of diskettes. 

Finally, a sad plant. "Take me with you!"

Photographs taken with a Leica M2 rangefinder camera on Kodak BW400 film. This was a black and white film that could be developed in C-41 chemistry, like any common color print film.

Shelter 3 at the Waterways Experiment Station, Vicksburg, Mississippi

In the previous article, I described how the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi, formerly conducted numerous tests using hydraulic models. Some were outside, like the famous Mississippi Basin Model in Jackson (see the December 2010 update). But most models were inside shelters or hangars to keep them out of the weather and limit dirt and debris.
Shelter 3 is an example. There is nothing glamorous about it; it is just a steel roof over a dirt floor. When complete, it covered 97,300 square feet of model space. Most of this shelter will be torn down soon, so the models were dismantled and miscellaneous equipment was moved out in 2010.

(Notice the "blooming" around the windows and doors. This is diffraction that occurs when the source of light is many stops brighter than the main part of the image. It is worse with small-sensor point-and-shoot cameras. High-speed black and white film would have responded similarly because of the thickness of the emulsion, but a thin, low-speed film like Kodak Panatomic-X would have minimized the blooming. The quality of the lens coating and the number of elements also affects diffraction.)
Until the building is demolished, it serves as a convenient place for employees to park cars. In a 1949 aerial photograph of the lab, a low wood shelter occupies this location, but in a 1981 photograph, this steel building is present. Many of the World War II-era wood shelters were replaced with steel in the 1960s.
A few treasures remain. A sizable collection of file cabinets and map cases contain old project files. As time goes by and technicians retire, fewer and fewer remain who remember what the files pertain to. It is unlikely that a hydraulic model would ever be rebuilt, but most Corps of Engineers projects, such as locks, dams, and waterways, last for centuries, so the data in the files may be of value in the future. But how will these files be stored and organized? Eventually the bugs and mildew will eat the paper if they don't move the files to a climate-controlled space.
There is still one model in the north part of the shed, but I have not seen it used in a long time. It was a section model of the Dalles on the Columbia River. You see a number of odd little footprints in the soft dirt, probably raccoon. There are also fox on station
The south side of the shelter was used by a joint US Army Corps of Engineers and US Geological Survey program that developed and calibrated river sediment samplers. Measuring how much suspended sediment moves down rivers is difficult and labor-intensive because field crews have to cross the river and collect water samples at various depths. Bedload samples are even harder to collect and calibrate.
For the field work, they used sturdy Army Bridge Erection Boats. These were sent away to some other Army base. I like strange heavy-duty equipment like this.

All images except the last (the boat) are from my Panasonic G1 digital camera with a Lumix 14-45mm lens, tripod-mounted. The in-camera black and white mode is very nice, with results as good as reprocessing the RAW file.

Update April 30, 2012: The shelter is actively being dismantled.