Insufficient explosives cited as cause of Saturday’s failed heating plant implosion.
A project manager with Loring BioEnergy – the company that owns the Maine heating plant that failed to fall in Saturday’s implosion – believes the explosive demolition sub-contractor hired to carry out the work underestimated the integral strength of the structure.
“This was built to be bombproof during the Cold War, when the social and political climate was totally different,” says Hayes Gahagan. “When the implosion didn’t totally work, my first reaction was that they underestimated the people who constructed it,”
According to Precision Explosives, the New York company hired by Engineered Products to implode the building, they used 290 pounds of explosives with 105 blasting caps, which officials said was a larger amount than usual because of the amount of steel in the building. Officials with Engineered Products said in a press release Monday evening that they were “surprised as anyone” that the building didn’t fall.
“Once the implosion didn’t take it down, we just knew that they would have to do two steps instead of one,” said Gahagan. “By 9 a.m. Monday, Engineered Products had the remaining smokestacks down and started dismantling the rest of the building with wrecking balls and other machinery. I was told that this would set them back three days, at most.”
While Precision Explosives owner Dave Evans continues to maintain a low profile, it has been left to Engineered Products’ operations and marketing manager to repackage the failed implosion as an entertainment spectacle. “The consensus of the on-lookers was that, even though the building didn’t completely fall, the event was exciting,” says embattled Jennifer Gregor. “Local people fully supported any energy related development using private funding.”
