Sign 11 - Magazine

Live shell components such as TNT, smokeless powder, boosters, and primers, were stored in specially-constructed buildings called magazines. During World War I, magazine walls were typically made of either stucco-covered tile, corrugated asbestos, or wood. Most were above ground.

At the Mays Landing Plant, the wooden buildings in which they were stockpiled were one-story tall and appear to have had no windows. Each magazine was surrounded on four sides by a blast barrier made of two 10-foot tall wood walls with a 10-foot wide space between them filled with soil. These thick walls, strengthened with tie rods and studs, were designed to contain the outward force of an explosion, but were not designed to contain the upward force. The earth-filled barriers enclosed a space that measured 25 feet by 50 feet with openings in opposite diagonal corners for railway access.

By World War I, American munitions manufacturers had developed distance standards for the placement of magazines from inhabited buildings. Their goal was to insure the least amount of damage would be inflicted in case of explosion. Called “The American Table of Distances,” it was based on a rigorous worldwide study of explosions ranging from small to nearly a million pounds, and their effects. The Mays Landing Plant magazines were sited 800 feet from the nearest occupied plant building, a distance that suggests by those standards each wood building was rated to contain between 6,000 and 7,000 pounds of explosives.

A total of seven magazines were built. Four were located on the east side of the 75-millimeter plant, where you stand now, about 1000 feet west of the South River. Another, for TNT storage, was located on the east side of the 155-millimeter plant. Two used for the storage of smokeless powder were sited on the south side of the 8-inch plant. Four others—two for TNT and two for smokeless powder—were planned, but were never built. Today nothing remains of the magazines, but the tall earth berms around them still stand and many have bolts and the ends of tie rods poking out from the vegetation that covers them.