Here at home, in between camping trips, I went for a drive one day, just wandering up some roads outside of the Olympia, WA, area. Holy smokes, did I find some interesting things … absolutely HUGE commercial storage buildings. I had no idea they were here. They are HUGE.
I’ve always thought of Thurston County, and the area around the city of Olympia, to be rather unpopulated … farmland, woods, creeks for fisherfolk, etc. But oh my gosh did I find something on my drive out and about today that opened my eyes!
Let me share the map first. And then some photos.
In the Google Earth image below, the city of Olympia is the SMALL red circle at the bottom of the image, at the bottom of Puget Sound. The LARGE city of Tacoma is the large red circle over on the right. Tacoma is a large city! But, look at what I found today … it’s in the YELLOW circle. It’s a large number of extraordinarily huge commercial storage buildings out in the country, away from any city, and it’s almost as huge as the city of Tacoma. Holy cow!
I’ll zoom in with Google Earth here for you. In the image below, you can see all of the green space, trees, woods, farms, rivers, and saltwater inlets, just wild areas. There are some housing developments for sure, probably mostly inhabited by the people who work in these large commercial buildings. But look at all those acres of buildings with stark white roofs. No green space there!
Below …. zooming in more, directly onto the most concentrated portion of those huge buildings. Just a few buildings, no big deal, yes? No! It’s a big deal! They are huge, each one encompassing at least an acre, most of them covering several acres.
The building in the image above with the RED X is ULINE. I’ve purchased some excellent cardboard boxes, in specialized sizes, from them to ship some expensive art prints I inherited. Their products are the best. But you cannot buy anything here at this building, it’s just for storage, so they can ship their products out to their stores (or to other stores that sell their products, UPS sells ULINE products, I know what), and maybe all over Washington State and maybe in Oregon too, or Idaho too, or other western states too. This one building (with the RED X) is about 1800 feet long by 600 feet wide. Now, that’s something to think about … 1800 feet is about 1/3 of a MILE! That’s how long just this one building is, and it’s not one of the largest buildings here. And it’s several stories tall. That one building covers about 1,080,000 square feet of land … or about 25 acres! I’m not exaggerating. These buildings are HUGE!
I was blown away. Sure, cheap land purchase, but my gosh how huge these buildings are.
Think about the electricity they use for lights and heat in those huge buildings, and the water they must use for so many employees … and the internet they use! If you’re following along on the news these days, it’s the internet and all of the servers, modems, wifi devices, all of that internet/computer system locally and internationally that is taking a huge toll on our electric grid. It isn’t fuel pollution anymore that is the “new” danger to our planet … it’s electrical consumption and what we’re going to have to do to create more electricity to support our computer systems.
Here below are some photos of some of the buildings. I took some of the photos, but some of these photos were snagged off the internet.
The building below had just been built and was up for “rent”. Think about constructing a building this size and hoping you’ll rent it out. The call for these sorts of commercial storage buildings must be truly significant for a company to build such a building on speculation.
Ah, yes, Amazon is here too. It’s one of the largest buildings.
The building below is operated by “Harbor”. I don’t know who they are.
And then, yes, then … there was ULINE, mentioned above, the building with the RED X on it in the first few photos above. The two photos below are from the internet, not my photos. The first was taken at night when the interior of the building was being built. Shelves and shelves and shelves, MANY stories high each of them, and every shelf would be filled with all manner of things that ULINE sells, just so they can ship those products to other companies who then sell them to us.
The photo below is also from the internet, showing one row of shelving inside the ULINE building. There are HUNDREDS of rows of this shelving inside that building. Literally, hundreds of rows of these shelves, each of them about four stories tall. Amazing.
So, maybe you are appalled at what these sorts of businesses cost the environment, what they cost all of us, not just in money but in the health of our planet. But, what do you buy online these days? If you buy things online, then you are using these sorts of resources and you (and I) are contributing to the problem.
I discovered all of these buildings on just a little drive out into the country, up a shady lane, through some woods, by a stream. I sure have mixed feelings about these buildings and these companies. I’m guilty of using those businesses, and other businesses too that copy this same model. And yet, I’m so impressed with how efficient many of these companies work … storing their product in a central location and then shipping it out when needed.
Who’s to say what’s best? I would bet that each of us reading here has their own idea of what’s best. For my part, in the end, on this one day’s drive out into the country ….. and yes I actually did get out into the country, the woods, the empty Puget Sound saltwater beaches, the streams and forests. For my part, in the end, that’s what is best for me, the natural world of our planet. Let’s not forget that.
