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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 Uy O. N. Malmquist The Tooele Ordnance Depot, a vast installation of the army ordnance department spread over thousands of acres of rolling lands south of Tooele, is commonly thought of as just an immense storage facility for explosives. But representatives repre-sentatives of the Utah press learned that it is much more than that, on a recent tour sponsored by the Ninth Service Command. expended forward, lessening the danger of nearby igloos being exploded. They are staggered on the end-to-end line so as to increase in-crease the distance between them on that plane. A few years ago the 26,736-acre 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 drouth-resistant grass, brought from the steppes of Russia. The igloos and spaces unoccupied by buildings are already covered by a sparse growth and the hope is that this will re-seed and thicken the covering. cov-ering. This dust-control program is being carried out under the supervision of the Utah State Agricultural college 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. O The project is a whale of a storage depot, but it is also an ; important salvage center and, when the necessary equipment is received 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 re-pair activities are more important impor-tant than the storage phase. The depot currently employs about 1.000 persons but when the tank and artillery repair section artfully art-fully activated employment will be in the neighborhood of 4,000. One single concrete building (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 hund- j reds of thousands of dollars to the investment in that unit. The salvage section offers an effective refutation of the popu-1 lar notion that the Army just uses materials but doesn't bother both-er to reclaim them. On the contrary, con-trary, the millions of rounds of ammunition fired in training camps and on battle fronts, parts of smashed tanks and automotive automo-tive equipment, packing cases and scores of other items are gathered up and shipped back to such places as the Tooele ordnance or-dnance depot for re-use or as scrap. Carloads of fired shells, ranging rang-ing 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 un-damaged or slightly damaged are reshipped directly to arsenals for reloading and the damaged 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 in-stallations in the area, and the commanding officers have nothing noth-ing but praise for their morale, sense of duty and willingness to perform tasks which' are normally normal-ly regarded as a "man's work." To the average mind, accustomed accus-tomed to thinking in terms of past experiences, the storage facilities fa-cilities at the depot are on a scale difficult to comprehend. There are approximately 1,000 partly submerged magazines or igloos for the storage of high explosives and several large above-ground magazines for the storage of small ammunition. 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 fill-ed with this particular explosive the value would exceed two billion bil-lion dollars, or more than three times the assessed valuation of the entire state of Utah. The igloos are constructed 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 the force would be |