September 24, 2018

Demolition to begin at one of Ontario’s last coal-fired power plants in St. Clair Township

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About $30 million worth of demolition work is getting underway at the site of one of Ontario’s last coal-fired power plants.

Stouffville, Ont.-based JMX Contracting was hired earlier this summer to take out asbestos and demolish idle Lambton Generating Station structures on the about-1,300-acre (526-hectare) Ontario Power Generation (OPG) site in St. Clair Township, said OPG’s Dan Roorda, who’s heading the demolition project.

Contractors have started asbestos abatement and are planning to start demolishing auxiliary structures next week, he said.

Larger buildings are expected to come down next year, followed by sorting and removing debris, before the demolition project finishes in 2021, he said.

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Combined with cleaning up fly ash and sludge ponds, removing turbines, and planned environmental remediation in the aftermath, the total site cleanup bill is estimated at about $60 million, he said.

The power plant shut down in 2013.

“The scope of the demolition contractors is to remove 100 per cent of everything down to the grade, but not unearth what’s currently in the ground,” Roorda said.

That includes concrete slabs and water pipes, he said, which could be used for some yet-undetermined future purpose.

““In an ideal situation, a future site would be related somehow to power generation,” Roorda said. “But what does that look like? We don’t have a specific plan in mind.”

The power company will also have to determine whether to leave remediated ponds on the eventual brownfield site for rainwater or fill them in, he said.

Any oil or other contamination on site will be cleaned, he said, noting as much as possible of the demolished structure will be recycled.

Plans are to keep noisy work inside of daylight hours whenever possible, and notify neighbours if an exception needs to be made, Roorda said.

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