Brea Chemicals Plant Construction and Early Operations Documented in 77 Large Sequential Photographs, California, circa 1953 to 1955

Brea Chemicals Plant Construction

Photograph

Brea Chemicals construction and early operations archive documenting the transformation of open Orange County foothill land into a Union Oil chemical manufacturing complex producing ammonia, nitric acid, ammonium nitrate, dry ice, and related fertilizer products. In 1953, The Petroleum Engineer reported that Homer Reed, president of the newly organized Union Oil subsidiary Brea Chemicals, announced a $13 million ammonia plant at Brea, Orange County, using natural gas from wells near the town for western agriculture and industry; C. F. Braun and Company was selected to construct the plant for completion in summer 1954. The binder’s R. S. Ray label supports identifying the series with Robert S. Ray, whom Caltech’s Engineering and Science reported in June 1956 as vice-president and manager of manufacturing at Brea Chemicals in Brea; trade reporting the same year also named Robert S. Ray among Brea Chemicals vice-presidents and board and executive committee members. The typed index’s note that ammonium nitrate warehouses stood in the hills “2 miles distance for safe storage” gives the series a direct safety dimension: only seven years earlier, ammonium nitrate fertilizer aboard the S.S. Grandcamp exploded at Texas City after a shipboard fire, causing the largest U.S. industrial disaster of its time and killing an estimated 500 to 600 people.

Photo archive of 77 Large silver gelatin photographs, mostly approximately 8 x 10 inches, Brea, Orange County, California, circa 1953 to 1956. The sequence is numbered 1 through 77 and keyed to a typed contents sheet headed “Brea Chemicals, Inc.,” with sections for Air Views, Dry Ice Plant, Nitric Acid Plant, Ammonium Nitrate Plant, and Additions. The numbering is a major strength: the binder is a mapped plant record moving from aerial land conversion to machinery installation, production, storage, inspection, and shipping. Aerial views place new roads, tanks, towers, pipe corridors, and rectangular plant buildings against open fields, bare hills, orchards, rail or utility lines, and graded construction roads. The dry ice plant includes presses, conveyors, corrugated-metal interiors, control cabinets, workers in hard hats, and elevated pipework. The nitric acid plant section moves through control panels crowded with round gauges and recording charts, air compressors, an ammonia converter and heat exchangers, absorption and cooling towers, exterior pipe grids, circulation pumps, and workers handling platinum rhodium catalyst gauze inside the plant. The ammonium nitrate section follows the prilling tower, evaporator, conveyors, rotating dryers, coolers, clay coater, bagging machines, “AMMONIUM NITRATE Brea” sacks, loaded trucks, and remote hill warehouses. Later additions include shower heads at the top of the prilling tower, product examination, a plant-ground discussion among suited and hard-hatted men, and an ammonia superheater in the acid plant. A blue verso stamp identifies the commercial photographer as “Rod Daley, 1320 El Cerrito Circle, South Pasadena,” with order number 2536. The archive gives a numbered construction-to-operation record of a Southern California chemical site.

EPA identifies the same former Union Oil Company of California facility as a 52-acre nitrate and fertilizer plant operating in Brea from 1954 to 1991 on a 116-acre site, with annual production of ammonia and urea; after closure, plant structures were demolished and nitrate-contaminated soils were excavated up to 15 feet deep, groundwater remediating wells were installed in 1997, Over half a century after our archive, PCBs were discovered in site soils in 2011, and about 185,000 cubic yards of impacted soil were excavated and consolidated under a capped area during the 2013 to 2014 cleanup. Orange County Sanitation District records still describe groundwater dissolved with nitrate being extracted from the former Unocal Collier Fertilizer plant site, now redeveloped as Birch Hills Golf Course and Brea Union Plaza, and discharged from extraction wells without pretreatment under a special discharge permit. Archive is a binder withphotos in clear sleeves; Photographs are in very good condition.

Item #23384

Price: $750.00