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Report - - The infamous Forges de Clabecq, Belgium - 10/02/07 | European and International Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - The infamous Forges de Clabecq, Belgium - 10/02/07

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killrob

Guest
Guest
A monstrous disused iron foundry in Belgium that used to provide employment for 6,500 workers, closed December 2001. The hot rolling mill is still in use (not in the photo below), but the site is so massive this doesn't effect exploring it one bit. We looked at some of the west side of the site and ran out of daylight before we even had a chance to cross the train tracks to the main site which houses the blast furnace which still dominates the small town of Clabecq.

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An aerial view of the site, borrowed (as you can see from the watermark) from globalview.be. The bit we looked at is to the very left of the photo. Big site isn't it?

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Our entry point. Just over the fence and in

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The main site and blast furnace tower we didn't even get round to looking at

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First building we saw was the coal bunker. It took us about half an hour just to get accustomed to the sheer scale of things before we moved on

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Power supply

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Need a wide angle lens I think

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Chunk taken out the concrete. Surely not an accident, must have been to make room for something to pass through. You wouldn't get away with modifications like that in the UK...

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As high as we dared go. The structure seems sound still but there's a bit of a lack of safety rails and walls without holes in. The building with the elevator coming off it is the coal bunker, the first building we went in and is visible on the aerial photo as the building at the top left

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Nearly the whole thing is made from sort of 'off the shelf' steel if you know what I mean. Nothing specially formed, just lengths cut and bolted together.

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It must have taken several years of production just to replace the amount of metal used to build the site

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My favourite pic. We needed torches even though it was daylight. Everything was covered in a thick layer of brown-black dust.

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Ferry back

Thanks for looking, does anyone know what any of the bits in the photos do? I should think this place will be around for a while to come yet purely because of the amount of effort it would take to pull it down. It gives a better feeling of what really goes on in these places than any museum ever could.
 

naatje from holland

28DL Full Member
28DL Full Member
Re: The infamous Forges de Clabecq, Belgium - 10/02/07 - REPORT

last december i visited clabecq to, unfortunately only with my crappy ass mobile phone camera. but the size was truely unlike anything I had ever seen before. I've spend two whole days there and been up the main tower twice but still haven't seen it all I think
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