Warbird Information Exchange

Just wondering what if any oil refineries are still there today? I would think that oil production facilities so heavily bombed during the war had to be scrapped and then totally rebuilt?

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Ain't no sunshine when she's gone!

Your post prompted me to have a look using satellite photos via Google Maps. Two enormous refinery facilities are readily visible, one to the east of the city and one to the south-southwest. They both appear to be in production because smoke can be seen emanating from various stacks, but within the borders of both facilities you can see a LOT of empty land that appears to have once been used for production.

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Dean Hemphill, K5DH
Port Charlotte, Florida

As I recall, they were back in action after the raid.

I'd think the facilities were used long after the war and any origional structures having been replaced during subsequent modernization efforts.
Romania, being part of the communist bloc, didn't seem to go in for a lot of historic preservation....

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Remember the vets, the wonderful planes they flew and their sacrifices for a future many of them did not live to see.
Note political free signature.
I figure if you wanted my opinion on items unrelated to this forum, you'd ask for it.

Looking at the map, most of the refineries still exist, although as was said, in much different configurations than during WWII. Some evidence of the bombing raids can be seen in the satellite images on Google Maps of the location of the Astro Romana refinery south of the city (it is a vacant plot with only the access road grid and a few structures still present and a large railcar storage yard just north of it), but the Brazii, Romana Americana (now SC Petrotel Lukoil S.A.), and Unria Orion (now Petrotrans) refineries show no real evidence of the raids. The rest of the refineries are gone and long redeveloped or turned into farmland, so there's absolutely no trace of anything left there.

Would be interesting to see a full survey of the sites as they are today to see the differences between then and now. My internet search found very little in the way of any aerial survey photographs from the area and even fewer maps of the target locations to use for comparison to the modern city.

After the infamous raid on August 1st in 1943 most of the damage was repaired pretty quickly. However when the 15th Air Force started bombing raids from Foggia in Italy, Ploesti was subjected to numerous raids which all but put the refineries out of business by the time the Russians came marching in to "liberate" the country. There must have been some gigantic piles of scrap metal when clean up operations began after the war.

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Ain't no sunshine when she's gone!

Here is a link to an extreeeeeeeemely long thread on a Romanian forum (in English, fortunately) that has more pics and info than you'd ever want to know about the raid, including a bunch of pics taken of the city and surrounding areas within the past few years. I stumbled across it while looking for markings info for Ploesti Raiders aircraft. It'll take awhile to go through more than 100 pages, but there's tons of fascinating info.

http://www.worldwar2.ro/forum/index.php?showtopic=1613&st=0

SN