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Show Tooele Ordnance Depot Also Storage Center Repair Activities At Plant Even More Important Than Storage Phase, Newspapermen Learn On Recent Tour Of War Ordnance Depot - By -0. N. Malmquist The Tooele Ordnance Depot, a vast installation of the army ordnance department spread over thousands thou-sands of acres of rolling lands south of Tooele, is commonly thought of as just an immense storage facility for explosives. ex-plosives. But representatives of the Utah press learned that it is much more than that, on a recent tour sponsored by the Ninth Service Ser-vice Command. The project is a whale of a storage stor-age depot, but it is also an important im-portant salvage center and, when the necessary equipment is received re-ceived and installed, it will be one of the West's major tank and artillery repair centers. From the standpoint of personnel, person-nel, in fact, the salvage and repair activities are more important impor-tant than the the storage phase. The depot currently employs about 1,000 persons but when the tank and artillery repair section are fully activated employment will be in the neighborhood of 4,000. One single concrete building (Continued on page eight) ORDNANCE... (Continued from page one) (500 by 525 feet) has been erected erect-ed at a cost of more than $1,000,-000 $1,000,-000 as a tank repair shop. Tools and equipment will add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the investment in-vestment in that unit. The salvage section offers an effective refutation of the popular notion that the Army just uses materials but doesn't bother to reclaim re-claim them. On the contrary, the millions of rounds of ammunition fired in training camps and on battle fronts, parts of smashed tanks and automotive equipment, packing cases and scores of other items are gathered up and shipped back to such places as the Tooele ordnance depot for re-use or as scrap. Carloads of fired shells, ranging in size from .30 calibre to 105 mm. are rolling daily into the Tooele depot. The small shells are run through a "popping" furnace to explode any "live" ones' and then shipped to the nearest smelter in need of that type of scrap. Larger shell cases are carefully inspected for "live" ones and then sorted. The undamaged or slightly damaged dam-aged are reshipped directly to arsenals ar-senals for reloading and the damaged dam-aged ones go to the smelters as scrap. A large part of this work, dirty dir-ty and disagreeable, is done by women. In fact, women are doing do-ing a big share of the work at virtually all of the military installations instal-lations in the area, and the commanding com-manding officers have nothing but praise for theii morale, sense of duty and willingness to perform tasks which are normally regarded regard-ed as a "man's work." To the average mind, accus- tomed to thinking in terms of past experiences, the storage facilities at the depot are on a scale difficult diffi-cult to comprehend. There are approximately 1,000 partly submerged sub-merged magazines or igloos for the storage of high explosives and several large above-ground magazines maga-zines for the storage of small ammunition. am-munition. One 80-foot igloo (they range in size from 40 to 80 feet) has a capacity of approximately $2,500,-000 $2,500,-000 worth of 1,000-pound bombs. If all the igloos were filled with this particular explosive the value would exceed two billion dollars, or more than three times the assessed as-sessed valuation of the entire state of Utah. The igloos are constructd in a barrel-shape of nine-inch reinforced rein-forced concrete and covered with two feet of dirt and gravel. The front end is intentionally made weaker than the remainder of the structure so that in case of an explosion ex-plosion the force would be expended expend-ed forward, lessening tLe danger of nearby igloos being exploded. They are staggered on the end-to-end line so as to increase the distance dis-tance between them on that plane. A few years ago the 26,736-acre reservation occupied by the depot was one of the state's worst dust bowls. There is still plenty of dust there, when the wind blows, (and it does much of the time), but real progress is being made in tying the soil down with plantings of rye and a drouth-resistant grass, brought from the steppes of Russia. Rus-sia. The igloos and spaces unoccupied unoc-cupied by buildings are already covered by a sparse growth and the hope is that this will re-seed and thicken the covering. This dust-control program is being carried car-ried out under the supervision of the Utah State Agricultural college col-lege at Logan. Housing for employes has been one of the major problems of the depot, but a housing project to care for about 1,000 families is currently underway. Some of the units are already completed and the remainder will be ready for occupancy. For single workers and troops stationed at the depot there are barracks with a capacity capaci-ty of approximately 1,400. The future of the depot, of course, is uncertain. Whether it will operate after the war is dependent de-pendent upon factors which no one can foresee with certainty. But much of the construction is of the permanent and semi-permanent type and would be usable for an indefinite period with proper maintenance. The igloos, for all practical purposes, are permanent in the broadest sense of that term. Colonel Henry E. Minton is the commanding officer of the depot and Major M. R. Gillette is the executive officer. |