After a year of planning and two years of carefully staged remediation and demolition, which included three separate implosions, Ontario’s last coal-fired generating plant is gone.
Mississauga, Ont.-based York1 is in the very final stages of the site cleanup of the former 326-MW three-boiler Ontario Power Generating Station in Thunder Bay.
Located on Mission Island on the shores of Lake Superior, it was the last of four plants that were closed and demolished as part of Ontario’s phase-out of coal-fired electricity generation. The others were Lakeview, Nanticoke and Lambton.
Unlike those other demolitions, which was overseen by OPG, this project was entirely managed by York1, says the company’s director of business development, Christina Murray.
After purchasing the site, York1 began initial planning in April 2020 and then began developing more detailed plans when its crews moved onsite exactly a year later, in April 2021.
In September, the first step in the demolition was completed with the blasting of the plant’s 198-metre-high concrete stack by Rakowski Energetics and Engineering. In the lead-up to that implosion, an extensive planning process was conducted with the input and participation of three separate engineering firms.
They included Englobe, the project engineer of record, blast engineer DSI, and ASI which conducted computer simulated tests to determine how the stack would react to the blast and wouldn’t prematurely fail, says Murray.
Some of the precautions included ensuring the stack would fall to the left and not to the right, which could have impacted an Ontario Hydro live switch substation. Any openings on the west side of the stack’s base had to be filled in with concrete and an opening had to be sawcut on the east side to allow it to collapse in that direction.
Favourable wind movements also had to be factored in, she says.
Tyrese Gould Jacinto founded the non-profit Native American Advancement Corp, which provides job training and promotes home ownership. ”We needed to forge something here so we don’t lose our children,” she said. (Emma Lee/WHYY) 
