Sprol

Most of the factory complexes we examine on Sprol are incredibly dangerous for the people that live and work around them. This sprawling 44,800 acre facility is no different; A large accident here would be deadly to the 1,400 workers. What makes this place stand out is that the product is even more deadly once it ships.

This is where bombs come from. The conventional weapons that the United States military drops from planes, the bombs that the United States sells around the world, they’re mostly made here, by hand, in a dilapidated factory complex first built in 1943. Although these bombs are nonnuclear, depleted uranium is used in their tubes to increase their destructive power.

Tax dollars at work, and all that.

A fascinating 2002 article by Charles Fishman sheds some light on the process. It turns out that making bombs pays better that you’d expect.

McAlester, Oklahoma is home to Oklahoma State Penitentiary — Oklahoma’s maximum-security prison, which includes death row. The town also has a Boeing plant that produces parts for commercial aircraft, as well as a 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart. Despite the bombs, though, MCAAP is McAlester’s employer of choice. For one thing, salaries in production start at $15 per hour — a figure that Boeing, Wal-Mart, and the prison can’t touch. And MCAAP offers relative job security, some chance for advancement, as well as health insurance, retirement benefits, and government vacation and holidays. The plant runs a four-day week, with 10-hour-shifts, and that schedule appeals to people who work on farms. Residents often try for years to get hired. Says Kitty Corder, who works for the state employment-services office in town: “If I had 15 people here in the office and one job at the plant, they’d all be applying for it.”

If you pan around the facility, you can easily recognize the most obvious feature of the place. As the Defense Department’s largest munitions storage facility, small, well-spaced ammunition magazines called igloos store the bombs. From the article:

Most of the igloos are served by dirt roads and don’t have electricity. Every magazine has restrictions of the quantity of bombs each can hold, in order to prevent chain-reaction explosions. To a person standing inside one of these igloos, those limits seem purely intellectual. The air is cool and smells musty. Two-thousand-pound bombs lie on their sides, two bombs to a metal rack, stacked four racks high, 36 rows deep. In a room about the size of a McDonald’s, there are 313 bombs, each weighing a ton. In 1985, a car hit a truck carrying such bombs on Interstate 40, north of McAlester. The truck carried no fuses or detonators, but in the fire after the accident, three of the bombs partially exploded and burned. The crater they left in I-40 was 40 feet wide and 25 feet deep.

Once the U.S. government is ready to drop them on heavily populated areas from a great height, the bombs are transported all over the world. As a nation, America has dropped more bombs on more people than any other country in the history of the world. We’re number one!

Special thanks to Jeff