A series of minutely prepared explosions brought the four remaining cooling towers at North Yorkshire’s Eggborough power station down over the weekend – a visually spectacular demolition captured from multiple angles in video shot by drones and ground cameras.
The blasts took place on Sunday morning, and almost instantaneously reduced the surviving quartet of 300-foot towers at the decommissioned coal-fired plant to piles of rubble. Those followed the demolition of the power station’s four other cylindric stacks on August 1, as part of the area’s mixed-use regeneration project. It’s rare for the passing of a major contributor to global warming like coal-burning plants to be missed. However, reports say hundreds of local people gathered to watch what had once been a veritable monument in Yorkshire’s industrial landscape be transformed into – quite literally – a dust heap in history.
Probably the best (and first) collection of drone and ground video of the demolition was uploaded by Aaron Morby, who added the Eggborough explosions to his wider collection of industrial boom-boom visuals. The footage he offers provides an arresting appreciation of the power involved in such provoked collapses, as well as the incredible technical, engineering, and planning skills of the company that mounted the operation, DSM Demolition.
Earplugs go in now:
DSM deployed drones even before they were dispatched to film video of the demolition from a variety of angles. According to reports in specialized construction media, UAV sporting thermal sensors were flown over the area several times before the explosions to make certain no people had managed to get inside the blast zone.
DSM Demolition, which performed 18 months of planning work ahead of Sunday’s detonations, also had to take extraordinary measures to protect overhead lines and switch gear of a National Grid sub-station located just 65 yards away.
The power plant formerly known as Eggborough went into operation in 1967 as a 2,000-megawatt station capable of electrifying 2 million homes. It stood at the meeting point of North, South, East, and West Yorkshire counties, but was forced into closure in 2018 after dwindling customers made it financially unviable.
The station’s reed-like 660-foot smoke stack was also slated for felling.
Eggborough’s disappearance leaves only six dedicated coal-fired plants in all of England and Wales.
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