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Tag Archives: lg&e
Electric ‘Lattice Towers’ Reduced To Stumps
Lattice tower reduced to a steel stump
The electric “Lattice Tower” on the Museum Plaza lot and its counterpart “Lattice Tower Mini” under the Ninth Street interchange are effectively gone. If your keeping track of the deconstruction game, you’ll remember the piece by piece removal of steel beams by workers high up in the air. We’ve continued the time lapse shrinking tower photography after the click (until it disappeared behind the floodwall yesterday). Perhaps with the tower gone, the hibernating riverfront triceratops can again roam beneath the highway (a fitting metaphor? replacing one dinosaur with another); or is there a better spot for its return? Suggestions in the comments (and eulogies for the deconstructed tower).
- Tight Rope Walking On A Lattice Tower (Broken Sidewalk)
- Riverfront Dinosaur Goes Missing (Broken Sidewalk)
Click through to see the lattice tower shrink behind the floodwall.
PrintThe Electric Sub-Station That Went ‘Thud’
The Electric Jungle Gym has been gone for over a week, but we’ve uncovered some exclusive footage of the last chunk being pulled to the ground. You might remember the earthquake-like crash that resonated around the arena site during the last stages of demolition… Well this is it. We couldn’t replicate the “boom” noise, but you can follow along with the video and add your own sound effects. The exciting stuff is at the end of the video, so keep watching.
- Missing: One Electric Jungle Gym (Broken Sidewalk)
Tight Rope Walking On A Lattice Tower
Tight rope walking on a lattice tower
The ‘lattice tower’ on the Museum Plaza site is starting to come down piece by piece as workers maneuver across thin metal beams with torches in hand. Work started on Monday, but the last couple days were slow with no major evidence of deconstruction. Today, though, torches were fired anew and large chunks were being lowered to the ground by two large cranes that arrived in late February. It seems to us that despite being anchored by steel cable to the lattice tower, those workers up there are in a precarious position when a gust of wind decides to breeze down the Ohio River. The views must be great from up there, though. We’ve been taking progress shots this week of the tower being deconstructed, and you can follow along in chronological order after the click.
- Demo Watch: Electric Structures Fading Fast (Broken Sidewalk)
- Museum Plaza Electric Towers Go Wireless (Broken Sidewalk)
Missing: One Electric Jungle Gym
Eye-sore no more: electric jungle gym gone
The giant mess of steel and wire we’ve been calling the electric jungle gym is now gone. And what a relief. We’ve been watching the thing slowly disappear, but were still shocked when we showed up today and found the entire structure missing. Only a few concrete foundations poking up from the ground. There’s still a little site work to do before its memory is fully erased, but it’s good to see the structure already gone.
- Demo Watch: Electric Structures Fading Fast (Broken Sidewalk)
- Demo Watch: Electric Jungle Gym Under Deconstruction (Broken Sidewalk)
Demo Watch: Electric Structures Fading Fast
Electric jungle gym already half-way gone
Well, that was fast. Just ten days ago, the electric jungle gym on Third Street was removing its first transformers. Today, the thing is halfway gone. There’s even a little brick building visible now we’d never noticed. We’re calling it the halfway house. The crews working to deconstruct the steel mess are from Chicago and are torch-cutting the steel into large pieces. Once on the ground, a giant tin-snip cuts them into truck-size parts ready to be hauled away. There’s also a lot more concrete in this thing than we expected and piles of it are laying around the site. It’s estimated the entire site clearing process will take another 4 weeks, but the steel frame should be gone pretty quick at this pace. The rest of the time involves ripping up the asphalt and concrete around the site so it will soon appear that the electric jungle gym was only a bad dream.
Meanwhile, deconstruction of the electric towers five blocks west is set to speed up, too. A large red crane arrived on the backs of several semis and is waiting to be set up. This crane is huge. One commenter called the large tower at 8th Street the ‘lattice tower’, so we’re going to call it that too. It and the smaller tower just west at the foot of 10th Street should be gone soon as well.
- Museum Plaza Electric Towers Go Wireless (Broken Sidewalk)
- Demo Watch: Electric Jungle Gym Under Deconstruction (Broken Sidewalk)
Museum Plaza Electric Towers Go Wireless
Electric towers being prepped for removal
Two large towers of power on and near the Museum Plaza site are being prepped for removal. Their wires have been snipped and new “sleek” metal-pole-towers have been strung out just in time for Mardi Gras. Crews with cranes were working on the two towers all day today removing porcelain pinecones and such, similar to the work going on at the LG&E deconstruction site on Third Street. We’ve known this day was coming, a day foretold by the disappearing dinosaurs, but we say these towers can’t be gone soon enough. We couldn’t find any timetable, but we expect them to be gone fairly quickly. Perhaps the deconstructors could go the dramatic route and topple the thing into the empty Museum Plaza lot, but we’re a little doubtful of that.
- Demo Watch: Electric Jungle Gym Under Deconstruction (Broken Sidewalk)
- Museum Plaza Falls Down, Climbs Up (Broken Sidewalk)
- Riverfront Dinosaur Goes Missing (Broken Sidewalk)
- Museum Plaza Electric Tower Sprouts (Broken Sidewalk)
Demo Watch: Electric Jungle Gym Under Deconstruction
Electric Jungle Gym on Third Street
The steel web of wires and transformers nestled on Third Street between the Galt House ballroom and the new LG & E substation has officially begun deconstruction. Now that the electricity has been switched to the new substation, the electric jungle gym is no longer needed. The first stages of the deconstruction process involve removing the very large transformers and draining their oil. The next step will likely involve removal of wires and those porcelain pine-cone-things (which are also deceptively large). The steel structure can then be cut up into small pieces and trucked away.
Many transformers have already been removed and drained and crews today were cutting up segments of steel. This electric jungle gym is one eyesore we certainly won’t miss downtown.
Click through to see early demolition work and the full jungle gym.
Local Coal Plant’s Ash Pond Rated On Nation’s Worst List
Mill Creek Station
Louisville made it into another ranking recently, although this time its a bit of bad news. The Mill Creek Station coal power plant in far southwest Jefferson County was listed among the top 50 worst sites for toxic chemicals stored in open lagoons. These toxic lakes contain such niceties as arsenic, chromium, lead, nickel, selenium, and thallium. The report called Disaster In Waiting was issued by the Environmental Integrity Project and used reports issued by LG & E to determine levels of the chemicals. You might remember less than a month ago, what might have been the nation’s worst environmental disaster just outside Knoxville when an ash pond dam broke and sent the sludge stew barreling through the environment. Here’s a little bit from the Herald-Leader who reported the study:
“”We wanted to know are there other sites around the country that posed a similar risk,” said Eric Schaeffer, director of the project, an environmental advocacy group founded by former EPA enforcement attorneys.
“The risk, he said, could come from catastrophic dam failures such as the one in Tennessee, or from chemicals seeping into groundwater.
“Chris Whelan, a spokeswoman for LG&E and its subsidiary, KU, said her company’s plants were on the top 50 list because they are large plants that burn a lot of coal.
“”These plants are among the top 50 in the country, so the more ash we produce, the more likely we’re going to be on those reports,” she said.”
The Mill Creek Station was built in 1972 and burns 3.7 million tons of coal per year (and to think, Louisville has a soot problem). The plant is now fully scrubbed resulting in the manufacture of a lot of gypsum board used in walls. The net summer capacity is listed as 1,470,000 kilowatts and is LG & E’s largest plant. The coal plant ranked anywhere from 11th worst to 32nd worst depending on the chemical in question. You can download the report (including some nasty health problems caused by each chemical) from the EIP’s web site.
- 8 ash ponds rated ‘worst’ (H-L)
- Google map of the Mill Creek Station (Google)
- Info on local power plants (Eon.us)
- Disaster In Waiting report (EIP)
Mill Creek Station
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