Widows Creek Steam Plant Demo...

Smitty500mag

I spent 6 years of my life working on site at this plant near Stevenson, AL and now it's just rubble. When Obama was elected TVA shut down almost all of their fossil plants and now they're demolishing the remains. Just recently they finished off units 7 & 8. It's sad to watch knowing how much work you put into these things. That was a perfectly good plant and they just blew it up.

Here is a video of 7 & 8 coming down. There were 6 other units just across the creek from these 2 units.
https://www.wate.com/video/3-2-1-boom-widows-creek-stacks-come-down/3970688/


I was standing on top of Unit 8 back in 1996 when I snapped this picture looking at the Ball Mill below with the Tennessee River in the background.




Here I was shooting some elevations for the installation of some piping that had to cross under the road near the rail yard.





My old field office.

jimdeere

Did they have to do a lot of asbestos abatement? The plant where I worked was in the process of switching to gas boilers, idling their 7 coal fired units. The old boiler house is full of A.B.
They will not spend a dime on demolition and abatement unless the government makes them.
It will probably be a Superfund site sometime down the road.

Smitty500mag

jimdeere wrote:

Did they have to do a lot of asbestos abatement? The plant where I worked was in the process of switching to gas boilers, idling their 7 coal fired units. The old boiler house is full of A.B.
They will not spend a dime on demolition and abatement unless the government makes them.
It will probably be a Superfund site sometime down the road.

I don't know what they did before blowing the place down but back when I was working in power plants we spent more money on asbestos and red lead paint abatement than we did on the job it's self in many cases.

wundudnee

They are now in the process of demolishing a coal fired plant here in Topeka. It was built I believe in the late 20s to the early 30s. I worked at a DuPont plant next door to the Tecumseh plant. We traded them deionized water for steam for over 30 years. It was beneficial to both plants as they had just old sodium softeners and we didn't have to maintain our own boilers. The plant where I worked has now installed their own boilers. There must be tons of asbestos and a lot of fly ash to find a home for in that old generating plant.

I worked construction when the Dupont plant was built. I finished concrete. I was working in the power house when it shut down. I helped build it, then got to shut off the switch when it was shut down. It has since been restarted and has changed ownership several times. It is currently being run by a Japanese company. It is the last cellophane plant in the country.