05:57 PM PDT on Monday, May 22, 2006

By KRISTINA BRENNEMAN and TERESA BELL, kgw.com Staff

Now that the often controversial Trojan cooling tower is gone, what's next for the plant site? For the immediate future, crews still have a lot of cleaning up to do.

AP photo

The cooling tower from the decommisioned Trojan nuclear power plant collapses in on itself in a cloud of dust and flying debris as it is imploded near Rainier, Ore., Sunday.

The majority of the tower is gone, but about 35 feet of the base still remains, along with a huge pile of debris, according to demolition crews who oversaw Sunday's implosion.

Workers plan to use more conventional wrecking equipment Monday, to knock down the section that's still standing. PGE will then focus on removing the containment building.

That's the building that used to hold the nuclear reactor vessel, and as of now, is the largest building on the site. It's scheduled to come down in 2008.

Implosion went off as planned

As for Sunday's implosion, demolition crews say all went according to plan.  

That pile of concrete and steel once stood 499 feet -- taller than almost every building in Portland. 

Three decades after it was built, explosives and gravity destroyed the tower just before 7 a.m. Sunday morning.

The cooling tower of Trojan nuclear power plant took two years to build and eight seconds to bring down.

"That was beautiful," said one onlooker.

A camera captured the demolition worker who pushed the button detonating around 3,000 sticks of dynamite.  In slow motion from inside the skyscraper-sized tower, a string of explosive flashes lit up along the concrete wall. From the air, Sky 8 captured similar fireworks at the base of the tower. 

"Ooh...there it goes...ohh...whew...that was it."

Onlookers scrambled to capture the fleeting moment and the aftermath.

"It happened so quick," said Darrel Johanus. “It just dropped pretty much straight down a little bit to the side and it was gone."

Another look at the trigger man on the blast showed that he too, reached for a camera.  His bosses confirmed that the implosion went according to plan.

“The tower moved exactly on cue; exactly the way it was supposed to. The debris is actually lower than I thought,” said Mark Loiseaux, who lead the Controlled Demolition Inc. team hired to demolish the tower. “We've got a wall over there that maybe 35 feet tall that we'll be dealing with tomorrow."

A swarm of boats, half a dozen helicopters and planes joined crowds of spectators on shore. All were witnessing the demise of a Northwest landmark and a little known trivia twist. Trojan took its name from a gun powder and explosives business set up on this sight 100 years ago. Workers used those same materials to bring down this cooling tower that stood along the Columbia river for 34 years.

Explosion was heard many miles away

People some 33 miles away in Winlock, Washington reported hearing the implosion.  They said they saw it go down on TV then a bit later heard the concussion of the thunder-like explosion.

The implosion drew hundreds of onlookers along the Columbia, and a few people hosted their own "Implosion" parties.

Two of the most outspoken opponents of the Trojan plant watched the demolition together Sunday morning. And later held their own ceremony in downtown Portland.

Lloyd Marbet and his attorney Greg Kafoury led protests and ballot initiatives to close Trojan in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Sunday, along with other activists, they pulled down a 25-foot model of the Trojan cooling tower.

(KGW reporters John Becker and Keely Chalmers contributed to this report.)