The first blast went off one morning above the Campbell River.<\/p>\n
A white steel tower, for a time among the tallest things ever built on Vancouver Island, leaned, then folded at its base.<\/p>\n
It had stood over a corridor of wooden pipes for seven decades.<\/p>\n
Within minutes it was lying in the brush, waiting to be cut apart.<\/p>\n
Nobody was anywhere near it.<\/p>\n
What happened next to the pieces says a lot about what gets a second life<\/strong> and what does not.<\/p>\n The tower that fell belonged to the old John Hart hydroelectric station outside Campbell River, British Columbia, where three surge towers stood over the pipelines feeding the plant. Workers used explosives<\/a> to topple the first one on a Friday morning, and a second followed about two weeks later. Two of three surge towers<\/strong> came down. The southern one was left standing, because it carries communications equipment, acts as a visual aid for the local airport and has heritage value.<\/p>\n The towers existed for one narrow mechanical job, protecting the roughly 1.1 mile pipelines that ran from the dam down to the generating station from the short, sharp pressure changes that come when flow is increased or cut back. Each tank sat half filled with water at the same elevation as the reservoir upstream, so water could ride up the column, or drop back down it, instead of slamming against a closed valve and tearing at the pipe.<\/p>\n That is also why they were enormous. For a period, the surge towers were the highest structures on Vancouver Island<\/strong>, standing 295 feet tall and visible from boats out on the ocean, each one weighing in the neighbourhood of 600 tons. Bringing one down safely meant choreographing the fall as carefully as the pressure surges it used to absorb, with a safety closure radius<\/strong> of about a quarter mile around the site.<\/p>\n The teardown was not a single afternoon of work. It unfolded in stages that stretched across more than a year, starting with the generating station itself and working outward toward the hillside structures. Old timbers and steel pipe<\/strong> both had to come out of a narrow forested corridor above the river.<\/p>\n The penstocks running that corridor were themselves historic objects. Three wood stave pipes, each about 12 feet across, formed the upper, low pressure stretch of the pipelines, running roughly two thirds of a mile before the line turned to welded steel for the steep final drop. They were built of old growth Douglas fir<\/strong>, milled on site, and had stood just outside Elk Falls Provincial Park, where walkers crossed them on the way to the suspension bridge.<\/p>\n That mismatch between design life and actual service became part of the story locally. They were supposed to last about 40 years. Instead they lasted about 71, standing through decades of use<\/strong> before a replacement station came online underground nearby.<\/p>\n Once the towers were on the ground, the two materials split into very different fates. Steel is almost endlessly reusable, and contractors treated it that way. The two felled towers were cut up and hauled away for steel recycling, and the old powerhouse and its steel penstock sections went the same route, according to the operator’s decommissioning updates.<\/p>\n The wood never had that option. Until around the 1980s the penstocks were sprayed with creosote as a preservative, and by the end the exterior wood and the seepage into it meant the timber had to be properly disposed of rather than reused. A utility spokesman put it plainly: “It’s not salvageable.” The timbers went to approved sites around Campbell River, with the Upland Landfill<\/strong> as the primary destination.<\/p>\n So the same project produced two opposite endings for its biggest components. One material came down<\/strong>, got cut up, and rode a truck to a scrapyard where it rejoins the steel supply instead of a hole in the ground. The other outlasted its design by three decades and still had nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n Steel showed up twice in this teardown, first in the surge towers and again in the high pressure lower section of each pipeline, which picked up where the wooden pipe ended. Crews treated that stretch as a distinct phase rather than folding it into the wood removal.<\/p>\n Steel penstock removal and wood stave penstock removal appear as separate line items<\/strong> on the project’s own site map of planned works, reflecting how differently each material had to be handled once it came out of the ground.<\/p>\n Those differences echo a pattern seen elsewhere in hydropower, where a redesigned turbine runner<\/a> tested at a California lab points to an industry engineering parts to survive contact with living fish, not just moving water. The timber’s fate<\/strong> sits alongside what played out when a rainbow trout<\/a> passed unharmed through a spinning turbine in an Oregon canal, a sign that outcomes now get measured at a finer grain than simple pass or fail.<\/p>\n With both materials gone, what remains is mostly an empty right of way. The ground under the old pipe route had to come out too.<\/p>\n Soil beneath the penstocks was contaminated to an average depth of about six inches, and crews excavated it so the corridor would meet provincial wildland environmental standards, with a contaminated sites professional<\/strong> overseeing the work.<\/p>\n Even so, the plan for the space itself is modest and a little sentimental. The penstock corridor was to be returned to forest, erasing the straight scar the pipes cut through the trees for seven decades, and planting began once the soil work was finished.<\/p>\n Residents had asked for a section to be kept for interpretive value, but because the real wood could not be salvaged, the idea floated instead was a replica section, painted to resemble the originals, as a small physical reminder<\/strong> of pipes that outlived every estimate made for them. What is left, in the end, is an uneven ledger. The steel towers and pipe sections rejoin the metal economy almost without loss, while the wood, patient and overbuilt as it was, simply ran out of uses once its one job ended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first blast went off one morning above the Campbell River. A white steel tower, for a time among the tallest things ever built on Vancouver Island, leaned, then folded at its base. It had stood over a corridor of wooden pipes for seven decades. Within minutes it was lying in the brush, waiting to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":46496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"crews felled two","rank_math_title":"Crews felled two 295 foot surge towers above the Campbell River with explosives and sent the steel for recycling, while the fir penstocks they once protected went to a landfill","rank_math_description":"Two 295 foot surge towers above the Campbell River came down by explosives, with their steel recycled while the old wooden penstocks went to a landfill.","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46497,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46485\/revisions\/46497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The towers swallowed pressure surges for seven decades<\/h2>\n
Wooden penstocks ran 31 years past their design life<\/h2>\n
Scrap crews recovered steel while the fir went to a landfill<\/h2>\n
A separate phase pulled out the plant’s steel penstock sections<\/h2>\n
Six inches of contaminated soil came out before replanting<\/h2>\n