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Muiden Chemie (Kollumerwaard)

When the Lauwerszee, an old sea arm, was dammed in the 1960ties a lot of new land came available. This area is now used for agriculture and nature reserve.

Muiden Chemie, producer of ammunition, was looking for a new place to build a factory. As the Kollumerwaard is sparsely populated this was an ideal location. However production had barely started (or not at all yet, I'm not quite sure) when Muiden Chemie went bankrupt from an illegal delivery to Iran scandal. The site was used for storage for while, but now it is completely abandoned.

After the fireworks disaster in Enschede (see Abandoned: Roombeek) the government made the rules for professional fireworks companies extremely stringent. So stringent that a lot of companies cannot meet these norms and have to move to a different location or stop their business completely. For these companies the government went looking for fireworks concentration areas where these companies can continue their business "safely".

Of course one of the proposed locations is this former gunpowder factory. The licenses for explosives seem to be still valid, meaning little bureaucratic trouble and the initial reasons for planning a gunpowder factory here are still valid too.

There has been only little protest against this. Locals are worried about transport dangers and nature organizations have pointed out that it is right next to the Lauwersmeer nature reserve, a National Park to be established. It is however one of the most ideal locations in the Netherlands and people seem to hope for more employment which the region needs.

This story can be found easily on most news sites (and google). The NOS has a nice movie with there news item, which can be found here.

7 December 2002
This place had been on my wishlist for a visit for some time. It is close to the village I was born and as far as I know the only abandoned explorable place in the region. To my surprise my sister wanted to come along, she's trainee photographer for a newspaper and expected there might be some "photogenic" pictures to be shot.


There are some military objects in the area too, which I didn't fancy exploring by accident, so I checked the sign first.

Problem: high, unclimbable fence.
A farmer was plowing the field right next to the entrance, but he didn't seem to care.

The officebuilding, shot through the fence, looks nicely abandoned.
We walked through the trees along the fence to try and find a way in. We found a hole in the fence, repaired with another bit of wire mesh. I started unwinding the wires with which this was fastened, but we soon found this was a lot of work so we went looking for another hole. This we found just two meters further :-).

We wondered if this hole was made by animals. At least it is used by animals, there were tracks in front of the hole.
The fence was pretty shaky in places, it might have fallen over if we had tried to climb it.
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