On Thursday, September 9 at 9am, the flue stack of Thunder Bay Generating Station was imploded by Budget Demolition. It is tied with the twin stacks of Nanticoke Generating Station for the tallest free-standing structure in Canada to be demolished. The powerhouses will be demolished by implosion by December. (Inco Superstack will be the country's largest demolition when it commences, sometime this year? But from what I understand, it won't be an implosion due to the potential to damage Inco's surrounding operations, so it will be dismantled top-down like Vancouver's Empire Landmark Hotel.)
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The stack was the fourth tallest in Ontario after the Sudbury Inco Superstack, Hearn GS Toronto stack, and the abandoned Wesleyville GS stack, and was the tallest structure in Northwestern Ontario. That title passes down to Atikokan Generating Station's 145m tall stack. The tallest free-standing structure in Thunder Bay is now the CKPR broadcast tower on Hill Street.
TBGS was converted to Biomass in 2014, and shut down in 2018 after the main boiler cracked in half, a $6M+ repair job. The facility only operated about 2-5% of the time in the last 10 years of its life, due to very low demand for electricity in the region, and cost approximately $1,500 to produce a single
kilowatt hour, with a staff of nearly 100 working full time to produce about 2-3 MW per year. In 2019 it was sold by OPG to Budget Demolition of Hamilton which is recycling as much as 98% of the building materials for other construction projects worldwide. Future use of the site is still unknown, but there are rumours that Budget Demolition, City of Thunder Bay and the Ontario government are in talks with a large employer about some form of facility being constructed on the site, contingent on the removal of the existing plant.
Anyway, more videos for those who like watching large things fall over:
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The previous tallest thing to be imploded in Thunder Bay was a 105m flue stack at the same power plant in 1998, seen here:
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