Azerbaijan Makes Me Feel Better About My Littering

God only knows (oh, and also the Aztecs) when civilization is going to collapse, but when it does the Caspian Sea is going to be one insane place to hang your pontoon boat. BLDGBLOG has an amazing post on the craziest patchwork of concrete, rail tracks and boats ever to have been cobbled together to create one of the world's most dangerous working environment.

It's called Oil Rocks and it is essentially a spiderweb of concrete and rail tracks and rust lurching into the Caspian Sea:

There are a number of massive artificial peninsulas extending offshore from the Azerbaijani city of Baku. The most famous of these is known as Oil Rocks, and it is an offshore metropolis of semi-abandoned oil extraction platforms in the Caspian Sea.

As Wikipedia informs us:

The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some workers' dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows. Although a full one-third of the Oil Rocks complex's 600 wells are inoperative or inaccessible, operations have continued without a significant increase in investment. The site, despite its imperfections, still produces over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan. The government has striven to attract foreign investment into Oil Rocks, resulting in several new additions being grafted onto the existing structure.

These "new additions... grafted onto the existing structure" are at least partially responsible for the epic nature of the place, as it seems to push ever further outward into the tides and weather.

Oil Rocks has 200 km of streets -- along with a bakery, cinema and gardens teetering atop concrete gangways and girders of rusted steel.

Makes you wonder what's going to happen to places like Oil Rocks -- and there are dozens of them around the world -- when Peak Oil finally hits.

Comments

[Atilla]

Oil Rocks nowdays produce a fraction of th oil output of Azerbaijan. The wiki entry is apparently very old one, may be a decade old. Don't worry, we will find someting when the oil era finishes, which will be never as the future is all about plastics and many other chemicals, again oil derivatives. so will have more than something to sell to the world :-))

[John Sarvay]

Oh, I'm not worried about peak oil. I'm just simultaneously astounded, appalled and amazed at our very human ability to create massive, sprawling structures.