Homer City plant’s implosion marks ‘downfall of coal’ as plans for natural gas plant remain on track
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Six and a half out of seven structures came toppling down Saturday morning as crews imploded four smokestacks and three cooling towers of the shuttered Homer City power plant in Indiana County.
The structures at the former coal-fired plant fell to the ground in succession beginning at 7:30 a.m., but the base of one of the smokestacks remained standing at an angle.
“That was not unexpected,” said Robin Gorman, vice president for government relations and communications for Homer City Redevelopment LLC, which is planning to redevelop the Center Township site as a natural gas-powered generating station.
She said that stack “fell straight down on itself. The top part, because it’s so heavy, fell, but the rest of it didn’t go.”
With rainy weather moving into the area, Gorman said crews weren’t able to bring down the rest of the remaining smokestack on Saturday, but they likely will make another attempt within the next two days.
“It’s an easy ignition to get it down,” she said. “It’s just when can they get in there to get the last piece.”
As was the case during Saturday’s implosion, the public will be excluded from a zone within a 3,000-foot radius of the follow-up blast. Five roadblocks also were in place Saturday on routes surrounding the plant, but Gorman said that step won’t be needed while toppling the final, shorter portion of the stack.
Implosion Technologies LLC of Milanville, Wayne County, was in charge of Saturday’s demolition. It received an additional permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection to implode an associated coal cleaning plant.
Gorman couldn’t say when that structure may come down. He indicated the company is not ready to provide details or a projected timeline for construction of a gas-fueled plant at the 3,550-acre site.
That project received a significant boost with approval in November of a $5 million grant from the state’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, to design, engineer and construct a natural gas pipeline to serve the plant. The plant site near Homer City is within five miles of the Texas Eastern gas pipeline system at Blairsville.
Indiana County officials have said Homer City Redevelopment has not presented them with specific plans for the generating plant.
Cars parked at the edge of fields lined a section of Black Lick Road, in adjacent Black Lick Township, as area motorists flocked to view Saturday’s implosion, some with a sense of nostalgia.
“It’s kind of sad because coal was a big thing around here,” said Clarksburg resident Matt Endress, who works as an inspector with Jeannette’s Ebara Elliott Energy. “Seeing this go is kind of the downfall of coal but the upbringing of gas. Gas is big for everybody right now.“
He was accompanied by other family members including his father, Dave, who is retired from a 38-year career operating machinery in area coal mines.
“A lot of our coal went to this power plant,” Dave Endress said before the smokestacks began to fall. “I worked at a coal mine down by Avonmore, and we could see these stacks from where I was at.
“It’s been a part of the skyline for a long time. On a cold morning you could see the steam” from the cooling towers.
The gathering of spectators included two New Florence men who worked at the Homer City plant up until its closure in 2023.
“It was a good place to work. I miss it,” said Brian Plowman, who worked as an electrician at the plant for 10 years. “It was weird this morning not seeing the lights on the stacks.”
When the plant closed, Plowman was able to land a similar position at another area generating station while other workers who were displaced moved out of state to remain in the industry.
“I just was really lucky that at the time there was an opening and I just transitioned,” he said. “Some guys just got other jobs around here.”
Dennis Baird said he was “sad but happy at the same time” witnessing the implosion.
Now employed at a nearby generating station, Baird helped to service the Homer City plant as a boilermaker during outages beginning in 2004.
At one time, about 130 employees worked at the Homer City power plant, which was the largest coal-fired generating station in the state. It had the capacity to generate about two gigawatts of power, supplying electricity to about 2 million homes.
Baird suggested thousands of others, including coal truck drivers, had jobs that were fueled by the plant.
“It’s sad to see it go,” he said, “but they’re not just letting it sit there. They’re going to build something new that will create a whole bunch of jobs” — potentially including more work for his son, Brendan, a fellow boilermaker.
Chairman Matt Housholder said the Center Township supervisors earlier had heard residents who live in the vicinity of the plant express concerns about the possible effects of dust from the implosion and the potential for damage to their properties, such as broken windows or cracked foundations.
The permit noted the blasts could generate a sound measuring up to 140 decibels. According to a chart published by Yale University, that’s the equivalent of a jet engine heard at a distance of 100 feet.
Following Saturday’s blast, there were no initial reports of problems.
“I was on Coal Road, across from the main entrance to the plant, at 5,000 to 6,000 feet away, and I didn’t feel anything,” Housholder said of the sound waves from the implosion. “Most of the dust went over top of what was their (coal) refuse pile. There’s really no houses over that way.”
He said there was no apparent damage to a nearby water tank that serves about 300 homes, although officials may test the water as a precaution.
“We’ve already done a check on some of the structures and nothing was harmed,” Gorman said Saturday shortly after the implosions. “We have a substation on the site and we have a water tower, and everything is intact.”
Any resident near the implosion site who wants to report property damage may call the DEP blast inspector at 814-472-1900.
Built in 1969 and expanded in 1977, the Homer City plant underwent changes in ownership as the plant’s usage of coal for generating electricity became more expensive than the cost of fueling a plant with natural gas. Homer City Generation LP, which owned the plant when it was decommissioned in 2023, filed for bankruptcy twice.
When the plant shut down in July 2023, the company cited the fact that it was running at about 25% of capacity, faced competition from cheaper natural gas prices as a source for generating power and had to comply with stricter environmental regulations on coal usage.
If the plans for a new generating station at the Center Township site become a reality, it would be the second natural gas-fired plant in the region.
Tenaska Pennsylvania Partners, an affiliate of Tenaska Inc of Omaha, Neb., built a 925-megawatt natural gas-fueled generating plant in South Huntingdon. It began producing power in December 2018, which was the culmination of a two-year construction project that cost more than $500 million, Tenaska said.
Tenaska obtained a commitment for water for the plant in 2011, seven years before it started generating electricity. It obtained permits for its discharge of polluted water in 2013, five years before power production. It underwent several public hearings, where area residents opposed it, while labor groups supported the project.
Jeff Himler and Joe Napsha are TribLive staff writers and can be reached at jhimler@triblive.com and jnapsha@triblive.com.