At this point, we’ve gone from wide-eyed wonder about what those futuristic floating buildings are, to investigative work tying them to computer giant Google, to Google’s admission that it was indeed behind them, to wide-eyed wonder about what Google planned to do with them, to the revelation that Google planned to use them as trendy floating stores, to wide-eyed wonder about when they’d be finished, to the revelation that Google was giving up on these things and decided to scrap them.

Am I forgetting anything? I think that about covers the story arc of the mysterious Google barges, one of which was thought to be a floating movie set or prison before it came to Maine and was ultimately revealed to be an ocean-going showroom for new products like Google Glass.

The whole Google barge project was an exciting one for Portland, where contractor Cianbro had one of three structures tied up for some kind of outfitting, high-tech waterfront work that had city officials salivating over the job-creation and industry cred prospects. Google in Portland? Combined with some of the other tech up-and-comers already building brands here, a Google presence had the potential to help Maine’s largest city carve out a little place alongside the Silicon Valleys and Boston Tech Corridors of the world.

But in late July, the Portland Press Herald’s Tom Bell discovered the Maine Google barge — two more of which were being worked on in the waters off California — was bound for scrap. In a physical sense, that seemed to be the end of the story. Google gave up on these things, and now they’re going to be turned into razor blades or reduced to the shipping containers they apparently once were.

A nagging question in the months since then, however, was: Why? Sure, Google ran into some permitting issues out in California, but it didn’t seem like those were insurmountable problems.

Google representatives were reticent to talk about these ships from the beginning, building them through paper companies it propped up to obscure its involvement. It took an investigation by the tech publication C|Net to uncover somewhat definitively that Google was indeed the man behind the proverbial curtain.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that Google didn’t come right out and say, “Hey, here’s why we threw in the towel on these things. Sorry to get your hopes up.”

Now, thanks to another investigation, this time by the Wall Street Journal, we have an understanding why the company quietly backed away from what was supposed be a trendy, talked-about retail game-changer.

The Wall Street Journal filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents regarding the vessels, and learned that the U.S. Coast Guard had serious concerns about fire safety.

Coast Guard officials sent repeated emails to Google and Foss Maritime Co., one of the lead contractors on the project, arguing too much progress had been made on the ships without consideration for fire safety.

“These vessels will have over 5,000 gallons of fuel on the main deck and a substantial amount of combustible material on board,” wrote Robert Gauvin, the Coast Guard’s acting chief of commercial vessel compliance, in a March 27, 2013 email to Foss, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In that same email, Gauvin said he was “unaware of any measures you plan to use to actually limit the number of passengers,” noting Google’s and Foss’ previous claims that 1,200 daily shoppers were expected to visit the attractions, but only 150 would be allowed on board at any given time.

Subsequent Coast Guard emails criticized the Google barges for not adequately considering how disabled persons might evacuate the ships in the case of emergencies, or whether there were enough safety measures in place if shoppers had to jump overboard.

Neither Google, Foss or the Coast Guard would talk in any substantial way to the Wall Street Journal for its report.

By September 2013, Coast Guard officials wrote in an email that the barge project “has been suspended until further notice,” likely as a result of the Coast Guard’s fire safety concerns.

Pay attention to the timing of these emails, by the way. This means that by the time the East Coast Google barge arrived in Portland in October 2013 in all of its fanfare and wonder — while we were all still trying to figure out what it was — behind the scenes, the whole $120 million-plus project already had one foot in the grave.

But not all was lost. Just for having the $40 million piece of property sitting in Portland waters, the city was able to collect the equivalent of $400,000 in tax revenue for it. And the amount of buzzworthy publicity Google ended up receiving over the last couple of years? The company probably couldn’t have generated that by spending $120 million on advertising.