These are not my pictures, taken from a drone by a local person. I'll credit him if I can find his name. Massive fire at Bethlehem Steel plant just south of Buffalo NY. Blaze started Wednesday morning and while it is contained it is still burning. Residents of the neighborhood behind it were just now allowed back in their homes. The facility is 1 million square feet and the fire engulfed it all. It hasn't been used for steel in years. There were boats and rv's stored in there plus a plastics recycling and pallet company. Many people who live in this area and many who don't know the history of this place. Relatives of basically anyone who grew up in the area probably worked there at some point. It was a good life and provided for many families. Unfortunately many people also got sick from working in there. A close family friend of ours just passed and was sick from 20 years of working there, everyone says he came back to burn this place to the ground. Luckily no one was hurt or killed battling this fire and as unfortunate as it is these pictures are so visually stunning they have to be shown. I'm not sure if this made national news or not but anyone from the area sure heard about it. Thank you to all first responders who battled this monster.
I live 15 miles away to the south. Usually the prevailing wind is from the SW, the day it started it was out of the north, it stunk something terrible 15 miles away. This is a picture from my friends window in the town I live in, 15 MILES AWAY!! It was clear elsewhere. I've never seen anything like it in my lifetime and hope to never again.
Wow. That last pic looks like my neighborhood when the one neighbor burns railroad ties in his OWB (true story)
was in the news here but the pictures were from further away they actually made the fire look bigger course we have old knitting mill fires here and they are always something you hate to see
This was only about an hour into the fire, it lasted days. Trust me, it got bigger. What's a knitting mill? Textile manufacturers?
Yeah, textiles, lots of cotton. The early presses had sleeve bearings, moving parts and gears that were kept lubed by dripping oil on them. It splashed and dribbled off onto the huge wooden floors. The oil soaked wood burns like mad. Huge beams and planks to hold huge heavy weavers, hundreds of thousands of spinning mules. One of My grandmother's brothers fell down an elevator shaft and died when he was 12 or 13 working in one. Mule spinners' cancer - Wikipedia In a way they should be historical monuments but they are too dangerous and expensive to try to find funds to keep them for posterity. Most are now gone, burned to the ground, torn down or a few have been turned into huge apartment complexes or used like your local steel plant - multiple businesses.
