She's a comin' down!

Looks like the end is near for an icon of our region.

Anyone familiar with northwest Oregon, southwest Washington knows exactly what this is a picture of. It's the Trojan Plant. Actually, it's the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, but anyone who grew up in Rainier, OR (as I did) knows that they really made giantic condoms. Ok, so maybe that was one of our more lame urban legends, but the joke never got old.

Today's paper annouced that the 499 foot cooling tower is to be imploded next May. What a sight that will be! Surrounded by a river to the east, marshy wetlands to the west and trees and hills everywhere else, Trojan seems so out of place. Actually, to me it is very much in place.

Having grown up in Goble, I spent my entire childhood living within 5 miles of the place. According to the map on the first page of our Pacific Bell phone book, we lived in the red zone of death. On occassion, the rather quiet tranquilty of our rural home would be interupted with a loud siren that was a test of the reactor breach emergency alert system. And this was all very normal to me.

Our family had friends who worked at Trojan. My dad and I got a personal tour of the place when our friend Rick worked there. Our school district was practically funded by the plant. The visitor center held our annual science fairs. My cousin and I often rode our bikes down to the parks at the site, which really were very pretty, and we even used to fish! Nope, I never caught a 3-eyed trout, just some lame-ass carp. One summer some friends of mine and I rode around the bike paths at the park so we could raise money or Cystic Fibrosis, something from which my best friend's oldest brother suffered. Trojan, in many respects, is a mainstay of my childhood.


Trojan has been at the center of a battle with environmentalists ever since its conception. I'm not going to go into some lengthy speech about how nuclear power, when used and maintained properly, never creates acid rain, kills salmon, or alters the natural state in which it operates. Obviously, I just lied. I just hope that those people who watch the tower fall next May and celebrate its demise remember that a lot of jobs and good crumbled with it. I also hope that maybe they will take some of this energy of theirs and focus it on other types of power that cause far greater damage to the environment. Wouldn't it be nice if these same people got on the government's case about building a fish ladder at Grand Coulee Dam, which would reopen over 1/3 of the Columbia River tributaries to salmon?

So what will I think next May? I'll be there, somewhere, within view, my camcorder, and my lawnchair. Why wouldn't I be?! When was the last time 499 feet of man-made engineering came crumbling down in Goble, Oregon? It's gonna be a fun sight to see!