Power plant stacks drop
Hatfield’s legacy ends in clouds of dust
Two of three giant stacks that marked Hatfield’s Ferry Power Station slumped to the ground in clouds of dust Saturday after being detonated with explosives, the first step in redeveloping the 236-acre site in Greene County.
A third stack at the long closed plant along the Monongahela River remained standing for another 20 minutes before also crumbling into rubble. The three stacks were expected to collapse almost simultaneously with explosions that thundered through the valleys, but the reason for the delay was unknown.
Demolition of a boiler house and two huge concrete cooling towers is scheduled for later this year, First Energy Inc. spokesman Todd Meyers said. Cleanup of the site will continue through 2024, when the land will be sold for redevelopment, utility spokeswoman Lauren Siburkis said.
In recent years, the Akron, Ohio-based utility has curtailed its capacity to generate electricity, relying instead on power from sources in 13 states to improve energy reliability, Ms. Siburkis said.
People in pickup trucks pulled off the highway near the plant Saturday to witness a piece of industrial history. Dozens of people on all-terrain vehicles jockeyed for the best places to watch the demolition along a powerline path nearby.
Across the Mon, Marcia Piper, who had watched the hulking power station being built in the late 1960s as a child, wasglad to see it go. She recalled the years when “it rained mud,” smearing car windows and outdoor furniture with soot from the stacks.
“I’m ecstatic,” the 67-year-old Ms. Piper said. “It was the dirtiest, dirtiest place ever.”
Hatfield’s Ferry opened in 1969. At its peak, the coal-fired
plant made enough electricity to power air conditioners and Cuisinarts hum in more than 1 million homes. On Saturday, two 700-foot stacks and a 540- foot emissions sc rubbing tower, added in 2009 at an estimated cost of $600 million to try to clean up the plant, crumbled to the ground.
FirstEnergy picked up Hatfield’s Ferry and the much smaller Mitchell PowerStation in Washington County in 2011. Like Hatfield’s, Mitchell burned coal to generate electricity — both plants were shuttered in 2013 because of new government restrictions on stack emissions and declining demand for electricity, the company saidthen.
The shift to lower cost natural gas as a power-generating fuel also was a factor in the decline of coal-fired generation; today natural gas generates 38% of U.S. electricity compared to 22% for coal, down from more than 50% at one time, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The demise of Hatfield’s Ferry has become a common story.
The Cheswick Generating Station in Springdale, which closed last year, is being redeveloped by Kentucky-based Charah Solutions Inc., which was interested in the property for its coal ash. And the shuttered Elrama Power Plant in Washington County, closed since 2012, saw some delayed interest when it was bought by Trogon Development, a subsidiary of Missouri-based Commercial Liability Partners in March 2021.
Demolition of Hatfield’s Ferry closes a long chapter in industrial history in Pennsylvania, where coal powered the U.S. through world wars.
But burning coal brought air pollution, and Hatfield’s Ferry was among the biggest power plant sources of sulfur dioxide, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation said in 2005.
Ms. Piper and husband Frank, 67, a retired long-haul trucker, have lived in the shadow of Hatfield’s Ferry since 1981, a coal patch then called Mount Sterling, where
Ms. Piper grew up and learnedto swim in the river.
“Everybody around here had a mine,” she said. “It was a community. Now, it’s all gone.Everybody left.”
Some of Mt. Sterling’s mines were flooded by the muddy Mon when it overflowed its banks. Others simply played out, many years before Ms. Piper was born, she said.
But the decline of the coal patch didn’t happen before some people tried fighting back.
Residents of Masontown, several miles from the Pipers’ single-story home, filed a lawsuit against FirstEnergy, claiming that decades of soot, arsenic-laced fly ash and odors had damaged their properties. The lawsuit sought class action status and compensation for about 1,000 families.
But the plant closed as planned in October 2013, three months after the lawsuit was filed.
“I wish it was still burning,” said a bearded, middle-aged man, standing with a few dozen neighbors along Live Easy Road, a dead-end street overlooking the plant. He declined to give his name.
“There were 300 union jobs there,” he said, sipping a can of beer. “How many mouths did that feed?”