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Yesterday a friend sent me this amazing article in Wired chronicling the two week effort to right the 55,000 ton Cougar Ace which was floating on its side in the North pacific carrying nearly 5000 cars. The story is really captivating on its own as real life drama (Poseidon Adventure meets Die Hard but it was this paragraph at the close that ignited the 10 year old boy portion of my imagination:

For more than a year, the 4,703 Cougar Ace Mazdas sit in a huge parking lot in Portland, Oregon. Then, in February 2008, the cars are loaded one by one onto an 8-foot-wide conveyor belt. It lifts them 40 feet and drops them inside a Texas Shredder, a 50-foot-tall, hulking blue-and-yellow machine that sits on a 2.5-acre concrete pad. Inside the machine, 26 hammers ??” weighing 1,000 pounds each ??” smash each car into fist-sized pieces in two seconds

WOW! that I want to see. I’m pretty sure that a car eating monster of that size can’t hide from our Birds Eye Cameras. A couple of focused web searches taught me that the Texas Shredder mentioned above is now manufactured and sold by Metso Minerals. On their website you can see images of some of the other very niche mega industrial machines they sell for crushing and recycling, but no Texas Shredder was to be found. So my research took a different tact. A few more searches turned up that once able to sail again, the Cougar Ace came into the Port of Portland and emptied its 4700 Mazdas at Terminal 6, Berth 607 and left them in the Honda Lot for Storage. The Live Maps Explore feature applied in the port region helped to zero in on the floating dock of 607 and the adjacent Honda parking lot. I suspected that this Birds Eye shot is of the waiting Mazdas:

But just to the north is another gigantic car farm containing 6000 more cars so i’m not 100% sure. Port of Portland is a major entry point for autos from Asia coming to the US so its not uncommon to see cars very uniformly parked in these mega-lots. Here’s a Map highlighting some of the features of terminal 6 in Portland. Be sure to turn on Birds Eye view and rotate around. I haven’t found the Texas Shredder being used to pulverize the Mazdas yet, but i’ll update this post when I find it the kind folks at Metso Mineral are helping me track down the possibilities.

Technorati tags: Texas Shredder, Cougar Ace