Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Urban exploration in Kansas
Stalker
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by Stalker »

I have seen alot over the years. They started burning blgs back in the 90's and plant look so different now.

I wouldn't suggest going in at night, man there is way too many hazards if you don't know the area. Plus its harder to check out the bldgs and area. The only exception would be the underground facility I mention earlier. Its pitch dark in that bldg all the time. And it is close to 127th and spoon crk.

Speaking of shook up, I found myself right smack in the middle of a stake out. I got a new toy and just couldn't resist trying out my new night vision. Stupid, stupid, stupid, man I about frooze to death, that night was cold and windy. They had the northwest corner boxed in, there was even a cop on top of a bldg. So for now it is best to let the area cool off.

Although, it is shed hunting time, the antlers should be dropping as I type.
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by lobo »

Good grief, what is so special they are watching it that closely in the northwest area.

I guess I would agree with you, let it die down a little. By the way, how much did your night vision set you back? Work well?, I guess it did if you could see a cop on top of a building. Obviously, the cop didnt see you.

Maybe I can hook up with you sometime and I can get a tour by an expert on the plant.

By the way, are the cops easy to see?, Marked units? or undercovers?
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by lobo »

Sunflower plant was on the news the other night, guess some dude fell down a well and broke his ankles, legs and back.
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RE: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by Scarried »

I know i dont usually post in Kansas site, but WOW, thats awesome, are the cops still there? Do you think they watch our site? Was the guy who fell one of us??? It's like a UE novel unfolding before my eyes. I am in st louis and we got cool stuff, actually a lot of cool stuff, but we dont have an underground mystery bunker protected by the goverment. That's exciting
I fall down sometimes
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by blindfire »

ive went into that plant on 8/27/10 with a few friends. it was pretty creepy and most the buildings we saw were torn down and all the tunnels we found had been blasted closed.
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by blindfire »

but back in 2007 the plant was heavily gaurded becuase of the shit there hiding in those tunnels (mercury=bombs)
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by VBJag »

Really? I was just out there a few weeks ago and pretty much everything was still there. Creepy? Why is every abandonment always creepy? SMH.

They did tear down the Nitroguanidine facility, so I haz a sad. :(
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RE: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by blindfire »

Ive been there, like two weeks ago. A lot of the plant is burnt. but there are still some buildings and the water towers. most gaurd shacks are still up. There was noone gaurding the plant when we went either. If you decide to go use the edgerton entrance.
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by blindfire »

in 2012 its suppose to be turnt into a big park and extending like the school of something.. but it will be gone 2012 kinda sucks its a pretty neat place. my friends dad use to work there he told me a ton about it
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RE: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by peterbillionaire »

...can't stay away
Attachments
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RE: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by SubLunar »

This was my biggest regret leaving KC. Next time I go, I'm definitely going here.
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RE: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by jayhackett03 »

Thought I would finally register subscribe to this thread.

I've been intrigued by this place for a few months now, but I've only seen the west side of it near Robert's lake. I'm looking to go back sometime soon. I guess Sunday mornings are the quietest times there?
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peterbillionaire
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by peterbillionaire »

I think so, too.

Earlier this year, there was an article (below) in the Kansas City Star that the money for demolition and pollution abatement had run out. That's good news for us.



Mon, Mar. 14, 2011
Vision of new community at old Sunflower plant suddenly imperiled
By MIKE HENDRICKS
The Kansas City Star

Johnson County’s contribution to the 21st century was to be a spanking-new community in a park.

Perhaps over all these years you’d forgotten about grand plans to rehab the former Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant on the outskirts of De Soto.

Once a massive cleanup was completed, it was envisioned as a place where 25,000 people would “live, work and play in a unique community” surrounded by 2,000-plus acres of parkland.

Then suddenly last week, that dream was put on hold indefinitely. Members of the project’s citizens advisory board were stunned to learn that the six-year-old environmental cleanup project was being curtailed because of huge cost overruns.

With the U.S. Army balking at committing $100 million more — on top of $109 million already allocated to meet the demands of state and federal regulators — Sunflower Redevelopment LLC quietly announced that it will suspend all operations by this summer.

“I feel I’m out on the dance floor between two elephants,” project manager Mikkel Anderson of International Risk Group told me by phone from his office in Denver.

Now there’s the real possibility that Johnson County’s dream might never be realized.

“We still have high hopes for that,” said Dean Palos, the county planning and development director who designed the community-in-a-park concept in 1998. “It’s unfortunate that it’s taken this long.”

•••

Sunflower dates to the earliest days of World War II. In the weeks following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the feds began buying up farmland south of Kansas 10 near De Soto. The result: a 14-square-mile tract that’s about the size of present-day Leawood.

On those 9,065 acres, the Army built nearly 3,000 buildings in which 12,000 men and women toiled during WW II, producing smokeless gunpowder and propellants for small arms, cannons and rockets.

The Sunflower Ordnance Works, as it was then known, went on standby after the war. But ammo production later resumed and continued until 1992. Five years later, the feds declared it surplus government property and looked for ways to unload it at the least possible cost to taxpayers.

For several years, local leaders debated whether to allow construction of a Wizard of Oz theme park and resort there. The Johnson County commission rejected the Oz project in 2001, and attention turned to developing the tract into a multiuse development amid large swaths of green space.

But then there was a big sticking point: The site first had to be cleansed of the toxins and explosives residues that once had the EPA contemplating putting it on its Superfund list. The soil was heavily contaminated with arsenic, lead and mercury, among other poisons.

The Army burned hundreds of buildings in the 1990s and early 2000s. But from the beginning, the plan was to delegate the cleanup to a private group. In exchange, the contractor would get title to the property and reap the rewards of future development.

Congress let Johnson County pick the developer. In 2005, Sunflower Redevelopment LLC, a joint venture of International Risk Group and Kessinger/Hunter, a Kansas City area real estate company, got final approval to move ahead.

Ever since, Sunflower Redevelopment has been removing environmental hazards. Sunflower Redevelopment also began excavating the building foundations and dump sites scattered about those thousands of acres.

All that dirt and material in dump sites had to be scooped up and hauled off.

But then another big problem arose: According to Kise Randall, who oversees the cleanup effort for Sunflower, the original estimate put the amount of soil to be removed at 612,621 tons. That’s equal to 26,621 truckloads, with most of it going to the Johnson County Landfill.

However, there have been some surprises. Significantly more contaminants were found than originally expected, mostly explosive piping, asbestos and lead.

As of Dec. 31, workers had scooped up 782,657 tons of dirt — 27 percent more than anticipated. Worse, they’re not even half done, which promises to double the original cleanup estimate.

One reason for that is the insistence by environmental regulators that the Sunflower cleanup be expanded to include 750 other buildings that weren’t used to produce explosives and hadn’t been on the demolition list.

And while they’re not contaminated with nitroglycerine and such, they pose a health risk, regulators contend, because they were treated with now-banned pesticides, such as chlordane.

In other words, chemicals once used for termite control.

“Taken together, cleaning up this unbudgeted contamination has substantially increased costs beyond the Army’s funding of $109 million,” Randall wrote in an e-mail response to my questions. “At this time, (we) have completed less than half of the originally expected field activities and have already excavated about 125 percent of the total volume of contaminated soil that was expected for the entire project.”

In short, the project will soon be out of money.

•••

Randall attributes the new money problems to a dispute between the Army and the EPA. They have different interpretations of a federal law that exempts the cleanup of pesticides that were properly applied.

“(The) Army believes that they are exempt,” she said, because the Army claims everything was done by the book. But “the regulators don’t believe that (the) Army can demonstrate proper application.”

In fact, it’s a little more complicated than that, said Gary Blackburn, director of environmental remediation for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the EPA’s representative in all this.

Whether applied properly or not, the pesticides have been widely dispersed into the soil as a result of the buildings being bulldozed, Blackburn said.

Had there been a plan in place at the beginning to cover up the contaminated areas with parking lots, the job of remediation might have been much cheaper than it has turned out to be, Blackburn said.

But because the agreement between Sunflower and Johnson County is to clean up the site to “residential standards,” there’s no choice now but to remove all the pesticide residue rather than risk it being in someone’s backyard.

“I think they way underestimated the scope of the pesticides,” Blackburn said.

The Army’s Tom Lederle disagreed. It wasn’t that the Army underestimated the scope of the problem, said Lederle, branch chief of the Base Realignment and Closure office. It is, as Randall said, the Army’s belief that the law does not obligate the military to pay for pesticide removal.

The upshot is that Sunflower can’t move ahead unless it gets more Army dough to pay for pesticide removal.

That, or alter the agreement with Johnson County, and somehow remove residential uses from the contaminated areas.

“This has been my fear from the very beginning,” said Micheline Burger, a member of the citizens advisory board.

The cost of the cleanup would be nowhere near as expensive if the site were converted to industrial use, Burger said.

“I never envisioned residential out there,” she said.

But that was the dream. Here was Johnson County’s last, best chance to build from scratch a modern, sustainable community in what Palos calls an ideal location.

“I anticipate that fully will happen someday,” Palos said.

Likewise, Anderson, the project manager in Denver, is hopeful.

“Our conclusion is it just didn’t make sense to keep going if we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be,” he said.

And if that outcome is that all the money spent so far would have been for nothing?

“That would be tragic,” Anderson said.
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peterbillionaire
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RE: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by peterbillionaire »

There is a small, operating water treatment plant to the west of the steam plant. We saw one worker there. So that is one spot to avoid.

Here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.92194 ... 6&t=h&z=20
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Re: Sunflower Ammunition Plant

Post by Nicotti »

But then there was a big sticking point: The site first had to be cleansed of the toxins and explosives residues that once had the EPA contemplating putting it on its Superfund list. The soil was heavily contaminated with arsenic, lead and mercury, among other poisons...

Significantly more contaminants were found than originally expected, mostly explosive piping, asbestos and lead...


The Army burned hundreds of buildings in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Burning heavy contaminated structures would not be my first choice for a healthy cleanup plan.
More online investigation than onsite exploration these days.

“My dear fellow, who will let you?”
“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
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