In search of Finnberget’s oil caverns (oljabergrummen)
While walking across the Kvarnholmen bridge in my last post, I saw what appeared to be the entrance to the former oil storage facility inside Finnberget. On this day, I got up at the crack of dawn to go take an investigation.
Flashback from last post on the inspiration:
2:20am walking down Kvarnholmsvägn
The fun begins on a flat landing just off the road to the left side of the bridge
There is a hole in the fence, and you can walk under it
To get to the tunnel entrance at ground level, just walk through the open gate from the landing down the hillside
I actually brought a tripod with me this time, which allowed me to take long exposures at leisure. The next few photos look like daytime because of it. Here is the tunnel entrance:
/obligatory
Here is the map on the front door. The orange portions are closed, and there is a main and auxiliary entrance.
No I could not get inside, but at least I could take a peak through the window on the left.
Even with this 5 second exposure you can’t see shit from the flashlight I brought. Fortunately I managed to grab a stick and poke that green button on the wall, and it turned on the lights for the whole place!
Sa-weet! That cement truck in the back looks really old, but it’s a huge tunnel considering. The tunnel bends to the right, which is consistent with this being the secondary entrance on the map.
At home I looked up the company’s logo from the map, and learned they’ve spent the past 10 years decomissioning and draining the tanks. Apparently they just finished, and there aren’t plans for what to do with them yet.
I extracted the shitty photos from their pdf:
It’s fucking massive in there
Now wouldn’t that be cool to walk around in. Ok back to real life.
The staircase to the pipeline gangway is on the other side of the bridge at its base.
You can see the moon here and how bright it is already.
I used my flashlight here for supplement lighting, and it worked 😛
Here’s another panorama
From under the bridge, I walked along the pipeline in the direction of the tunnel’s main entrance.
Incidentally, the tripod caused my camwhoring to flourish by over 9000%
I love the hint of pink you see in the sky.
I was afraid to continue further down the pipeline, because they headed towards a much larger building that seemed very much occupied. This actually turned out to be my shortest trip so far, and is only two pages long!
The rising sun makes everything more delicious
The point here is to show the time and the kind of light you can expect with it.
On the way home you pass Finnbergstunneln, and I had the forsight to snap this photo as I walked by. I’ve noticed this third tunnel bore for a long time, but only now realized it might be connected to the storage system in some way.
I started scouring google for any more information about the oljabergrummen and to see if I could find a better map, because I wanted to see if this tunnel might be a back entrance. Googling the name on it wasn’t really helpful. In photoshop I cut out the tunnel map from the door and overlaid it onto an aeriel photo, trying my best to line up the entrances.
It seemed promising that the closed orange part could be at this third tunnel bore, but after further research I determined that not to be the case. In a pdf from Nacka kommun on their future plans for Kvarnholmen (bulldoze everything), they had a map of predicted traffic flows.
IThey happened to draw in the tunnel I was curious about, and you can see it merely connects to this building with the same “operan and dramaten” logo on its façade:
I guess this used to be a coffee bean factory before being sold to a theatre company, literally “opera and drama”. In the same pdf, they had an aside about Kvarnholmen’s oil history and a small diagram of oil properties in the area. They don’t show any of the tunnels, but they do show the tanks and there are 6 of them which match the 6 from the map.
This is the best I’ve come up with:
I would very much love to take a tour inside their someday, but back to reality now. You can see the retirement castle in the background.
Taking pictures directly into the sun yields better results than one might think.
The end!
