The final remnants of the old Concord Steam plant are beginning to disappear, starting with the demolition of the 100-foot-tall chimney.
New Hampshire Demolition, a firm based in Auburn, began taking down the chimney on Thursday. They will first remove the top 40 feet by dislodging the bricks by hand and putting them down into the chimney itself, then demolish the remaining 60 feet with an excavator.
“You’re going to have a pretty massive pile of bricks at the bottom,” said Michael Connor, an administrator with the Department of Administrative Services.
The chimney, officially called a stack, was used for 79 years when the plant burned wood chips and sent steam through pipes to heat more than 100 buildings in Concord, including the State House. Concord Steam shut in 2017 after years of financial losses, with most buildings replacing steam with natural gas. Its plant on Industrial Drive in the Hugh Gallen State Office Park has been taken down in stages ever since.
Taking down the chimney faces some time constraints. Work can’t begin until the state laundry facility closes at 3:30 p.m. on weekdays because those workers are inside the safety zone of one and a half times the height of the chimney, and it has to end by 7 p.m. because of the city’s noise ordinance.
If all goes as planned, Connor said, virtually the entire plant will soon be gone except for a retaining wall and a couple of oil tanks, surrounded by a fence.
“We’ll get a structural engineer to look at the retaining wall, see if it needs supports. We’ll fill in remnants of tunnel systems, there might be some other voids … under where the boilers were that we need to fill in,” Connor said. They’ll put that final stage out to bid and probably get it done next summer.
The short-term plan is to replace the plant with a parking lot, perhaps surfaced only with gravel. A master plan calls for the construction of a parking garage, although changes made to commuting habits by COVID-19 may cause a rethink.
Concord Steam was created in 1938 by a group of businessmen led by Concord Electric Co. President Allen Hollis. They wanted an alternative to the many small coal-fired heating plants operating in downtown buildings, which filled the city with dust and soot.
It operated downtown from a plant on Bridge Street until 1977, when Concord Steam bought the steam-heating system for what was then the state hospital, now the Gallen Office Park, and combined them, switching the fuel from oil to wood. As part of it, the company built the chimney; a 2017 Monitor story said Hollis joked he wanted it tall enough to send the smoke to Allenstown.
The arrival of cheap natural gas heating undercut Concord Steam’s prices which, combined with the 2008 recession, drove it out of business.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
