Reports suggest blast took just a bit too much off top 298 foot stack.
The first thought from several spectators after a demolition team took down most of the last smokestack at East Toledo’s old Acme power plant site Friday morning was that what remained was too short.
“I think they messed up, and took out way more than they wanted to,” said Bill Reece, an East Toledoan who watched the implosion from a field along Front Street, south of where the plant once stood.
Not exactly — nobody messed up, at least that’s what both officials from the city and the Oklahoma-based subcontractor that rigged and detonated the stack now say.
The implosion was within the tolerances established beforehand.
But the result, a city official conceded afterward, was not quite what had been hoped for.
“Unfortunately, we lost some of the height we wanted to maintain,” economic development director Bill Burkett said.
But the 75 feet or so that remains, he said, “will be stabilized at that height and we go from there.”
At 75 feet, it will be less than half the height that Lisa Ward, spokesman for Mayor D. Michael Collins’ administration, said it would become when initial plans were publicized in mid-June to demolish two other Acme stacks and shorten the biggest one.
