Urban Exploration – God’s Waiting Room

All things must die.  The inevitability that we all face is true of buildings and places as much as it is people.

Nowhere does that hit home more than within abandoned medical facilities such as aged care homes.  These places of care and love are also places of pain and deep sorrow.  Often, people end up here in their final days – a purgatory of sorts, halfway between the living and the dead.  A waiting room for those waiting to die.

As these facilities age they must be upgraded in order to continue to maintain increasingly rigid standards and compliance.  But the older the facility the more problematic this is.  Often it is cheaper to build from scratch than retrofit whilst also maintaining a continued standard of care.  Consequently, a new facility is built, the patients are transferred and the old facility is closed.  This is where the rot sets in.  Because while this scenario plays itself out over and over again, the costs of aged care can remain artificially inflated as operators control the supply.  And so the old facility stands empty, neglected and utterly wasted.  Bear in mind, whilst these facilities stand abandoned and empty, 1 in 200 people in Australia are homeless.

More often than not these facilities end up placed for sale on the open market but, unless they are located in a highly sought after area, the costs of remediation often deter potential buyers.  Consequently, these places enter their own purgatory and linger, halfway between life and death.  And the longer they linger the more they deteriorate.  First, the elements eat away at them.  Then the scrappers and copper thieves rape them.  Then the vandals destroy them before, eventually, they meet their demise with the wrecking ball.  Gone.  Wasted.  All things must die.

Exact location details withheld.