GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – If you’ve driven over the Highway 172 bridge lately, you’ve probably noticed a massive crane next to the Georgia-Pacific smokestack. But what exactly is going on?
That crane is the beginning of the effort to officially take the second stack down.
“The skyline of Green Bay will look different!” said Georgia-Pacific Public Affairs Manager, Mike Kawleski. “The stack joins some other decommissioning of coal handling equipment and towers that we don’t need anymore because we’re no longer using coal.”
The facility is turning to natural gas boilers instead of coal. The second boiler was delivered last year, and cost $27 million to purchase and install. Kawleski says it’ll also cost about $14 million to completely take down and remove the obsolete building and equipment from the mill.
With the crane in place and a massive structure to remove, the question for many becomes – how are they going to get that down?
“Well, we would love to have an implosion or something dramatic to show everybody – but our facility has a lot of surrounding buildings and structures around the stack,” Kawleski told WTAQ News. “[Contractors] will go up to the top of it and they dismantle it down to a certain level that we can actually use a crane and a wrecking ball to demolish the rest of it.”
He expects the demolition to be complete by late fall.
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