ELMA, Grays Harbor County —

If you ever find yourself inside a nuclear-plant cooling tower — and no, this is not an episode from "The Simpsons" — the most amazing thing you'll notice is the echo.

Say "Hey!" even in a moderate tone of voice, and you'll get at least nine distinct "Hey's" right back at you, like members of a softball team returning your cheer, one by one.

The sound bounces back and forth against three-foot-thick concrete walls that surround you and reach nearly 500 feet up. And that little round patch of white way above you? That's the sky.

And why do you need to know this? Because it's entirely possible you will find yourself in a cooling tower one day — this one, in fact — thanks to an unusual set of circumstances set in motion by the financial collapse of a multibillion-dollar power utility.

And if you do get here, you'll want to make good use of your visit, as contractor Ian Wells did one drizzly day last fall, when he came here to propose to Mindy Steuermann, secretary for a pest-control company.

"I figured there's not too many romantic spots in Elma," said Wells, who worked for a landscaping company at the site. "And I wanted to make it memorable."

The cooling tower itself isn't open to the public yet, but it may be within the next couple of years. Already, work has begun to brighten up the public area around it with colorful murals, hanging gardens, decorative plants and picnic areas.

"It's not every day that you get to reinvent a nuclear plant," said Tami Garrow, president and CEO of Satsop Development Park, which occupies the site.

If you've driven between Olympia and Aberdeen, you've probably noticed two mammoth gray towers, shaped like pinched cones, perched high on a hill above the Satsop River, with blinking lights on top so airplanes don't hit them.

The towers, and the buildings that surround them, are the remnants of two nuclear-power plants that were never completed. Now they're home to two dozen businesses and government offices with a combined work force of about 400.

Whoops

GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES BEFORE: These structures at the Satsop Development Park were built to house a nuclear power plant that was never completed.

In order to understand how this got here, a bit of history is in order, particularly for new arrivals.

Can you say "Whoops?" That's how the media and public pronounced the initials WPPSS of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a consortium of public-energy utilities.

Back in the 1970s, with demand for electricity growing rapidly in the Northwest, WPPSS planned to build five nuclear power plants — two here and three at Hanford in Eastern Washington.

But by the early 1980s, those plans began to unravel. Costs of the projects had soared, concerns about nuclear power's safety was growing and a new emphasis on energy conservation meant the region might not need as much electricity as previously thought.

In 1983, all that added up to a $ 2.25 billion default on WPPSS bonds, freezing construction with one of the Satsop reactors 75 percent complete.

For years the site sat dormant. Under state law, the abandoned projects would have to be dismantled. "That would have cost about $100 million — and that's a conservative estimate," Garrow said.

Instead, local officials saw the chance to turn a fiasco into a fortuity. Why not turn the aborted plant into a source of jobs for Grays Harbor County, where declines in timber and fishing have produced high unemployment?

"Instant opportunity"

KIM STERLING AFTER: Concrete walls and buildings would come alive with color in this depiction by artist Kim Sterling. "I go into big, unhuman places," he says, "and try to make them a little bit more human."

Encouraged by legislators from coastal counties, the state in 1999 authorized WPPSS and Bonneville Power to give the county ownership of the site, plus $15 million in seed money.

"What you had here was a supersized infrastructure that the county could never have afforded to build," Garrow said. "It was an instant opportunity."

Consider just a few of the things already here: More than 400 acres had been cleared and graded. About 1 million square feet of building space had been constructed, and concrete pads had been poured for more.

In addition, the site had wells that could produce up to 14 million gallons a day, a sewer plant to support a campus of 5,000 workers, and it sat right on the BPA main north-south power line.

To manage the site, the state created the Grays Harbor Public Development Authority, a public corporation.

Among the first businesses to set up shop here was SafeHarbor Technology Corp., started by three local men who saw "an opportunity to give back to the community with high-tech jobs," said company CEO Annette Jacobs.

SafeHarbor, with 140 employees at Satsop, offers a range of phone, e-mail, chat and Web-based support services, with more than 25 companies among its current clients. If you're a Washington Mutual bank customer, for example, and you need help negotiating the bank's Web site, you may be connected to a "knowledge technician" at Satsop.

One building the park inherited came with bulletproof windows, concrete vaults, extra-thick walls and earthquake-resistant construction. It would have been the "site security" center of the nuclear plant. Now it's the park's telecommunications center, featuring three separate fiber-optic feeds. Here, more than a dozen communications companies, Web-service providers and other businesses have back-up telecommunications equipment under round-the-clock security.

Spiffing up the place

THE SEATTLE TIMES, 1985 MONUMENT: The Satsop site became a looming symbol of failure after WPPSS' $2.25 billion bond default in 1983.

And what would you do with a giant cooling tower? If you're HomePlate Siding, a tenant at the park since 2003, you use it as a cooling tower.

Inside of one of the towers, the company cools water used in a high-heat process that presses together recycled plastic and waste wood into durable home siding. The company has 85 workers now and plans to increase that to 120.

So how would you turn a nuclear plant into a place people might enjoy spending some time? Adding color, landscaping, picnic tables and other amenities is the goal of an "art park" project on which $40,000 to $50,000 will be spent this year.

Artist Kim Sterling, a former Seattle resident in Santa Cruz, Calif., has done designs for painting three water tanks and some sections of concrete wall built for the nuclear plant. He also envisions a hanging garden atop a one-story building with greenery draped down the side to soften its "bunker-like" appearance.

"I go into big, unhuman places and try to make them a little bit more human," said Sterling, whose work has included a 105-foot-wide mural depicting the history of flight at Honeywell International offices in Glendale, Ariz.

Working from Sterling's Satsop designs, a Hoquiam company, Root Paint, has put white primer on some of the water tanks and will add color this spring.

Echoes of history

THE SEATTLE TIMES An outside stairway on one of the two Satsop cooling towers allows workers access to the top.

Opening the second cooling tower to the public has to wait until officials can figure out a good way to prevent people from getting to the stairway up its side. Grass has been planted inside, and Garrow would like to put up signs telling the site's history.

The cooling-tower echo, she said, has drawn the interest of musicians and sound engineers. A Bainbridge Island company, Trillium Lane Labs, has asked to take "acoustic samples" on the site to use in making software that helps its customers produce sound effects.

When Ian Wells, 29, chose this site for his marriage proposal, he wasn't thinking specifically about its sound effects, but did want to make an impression. He also told a little fib.

"He said, 'Can you come up here? I'm having some car trouble.' " recalls Mindy Steuermann, 26. "And I thought, 'Why would he call me if he's having car trouble?' "

She started to put two and two together, though, when he walked her into the grass field in the cooling tower. The couple had already looked at wedding rings together.

Did she know he was about to propose?

"I was hoping," she said.

Steuermann and Wells will be married early next month at the Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Hall in Elma, but will have their wedding reception with 350 guests at the business park, in a building not far from the cooling tower.

People friendly

GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Among the first companies to set up shop at Satsop was SafeHarbor Technology. Chris Hansen, human resources director, is shown here in the conference room.

Garrow said as the park's CEO, she's always looking for "people-friendly" uses of the site. For example, batting cages for a local girls' softball team have been set up inside a steel dome that was built to be a lid for one of the nuclear reactors.

Millions of people pass by on Highway 12 just north of the park each year on their way to Westport, Ocean Shores and the Olympic Peninsula, Garrow said. She figures amenities that might prompt people to stop could encourage other businesses to locate there.

The cleared space at Satsop represents only about a quarter of the site's 1,700 acres. The rest was designated as wildlife habitat to mitigate the effects of the nuclear plant.

Garrow is working with the State Department of Wildlife to see what kinds of "passive enjoyment opportunities," such as bike paths and walking trails, may be added.

"It's a careful balancing act," Garrow said. "We want a thriving business park that is also sensitive to the environment around it."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com