Original subtitles

♪

Zdenek: A giant power plant

That helped drive an electrical revolution

And power the american dream.

At its heart, giant-sized technology

That harnessed the raw energy of coal and steam

To help take millions of americans

Into the bright lights of the modern age.

This super-sized piece of engineering genius was

One of the most advanced power stations of its time.

An incredible, electricity-making machine

That has finally reached the end of its working life.

It's time to tear it to pieces.

(metal clanging)

Now that's how you take apart a power plant!

And recycle what we can for cash.

As salvage teams strip back this huge power station,

I'll get up close and hands-on

To discover the five engineering innovations

That made this mighty machine's work possible.

As we break it down, piece by piece,

We uncover the extraordinary story of electricity,

How it was generated and how coal powered america.

Before finally bringing buck steam station crashing down.

♪

I'm chad zdenek.

I spent seven years building rocket engines for nasa.

Now, I'm taking things apart,

Breaking down giants of engineering piece by piece

So I can discover what made them legends of their time.

♪

Electricity helped start an industrial revolution in america

And when the economy was booming in the 1920s,

The pioneers of electricity raced

To build bigger and better power plants.

And this is one of them.

Buck power station outside salisbury, north carolina,

It's a quarter of a mile long and five stories high.

It's made of 30,000 tons of metal and brick.

In 1925, most of the country was still lit by kerosene

And powered by steam.

Only a third of every day americans

Had access to electricity.

But within a year, it would be available

To the entire country at the flick of a switch.

Several hydro and fossil-fueled power plants were built

In the first two decades of the 1900s,

But special engineering was pioneered here at buck.

♪

For almost a century,

This place provided the electrical power

For 15 million homes and factories.

It transformed this part of america.

And for all that time,

Buck was completely dependent on coal,

Burning up to 10,000 tons of it every single day.

Finally, coal power is being replaced

By cleaner, greener, more efficient ways

Of producing electricity.

Now, this is a dinosaur of the coal age

And its era is truly over. (horn blaring)

♪

So we're gonna tear it apart.

Here's the plan.

Over the next 12 months,

I'm gonna help a demolition team gut the place.

As they salvage what they can to sell for recycling,

We'll set detonators and implode the whole thing.

Before the boom,

I'll reveal the five engineering innovations

Inside this plant that first transformed american life

And then powered it for nearly a century.

First, the vast boilers that devoured coal

To make high-pressured steam.

The mammoth turbines whose fan blades used steam

To create motion.

The enormous generators that turned motion into electricity.

The giant condensers which allowed the whole process

To run with maximum efficiency.

And, the towering, modern precipitators,

Built to battle the pollution made by burning coal.

♪

Goodman: So actually, probably the best thing

To do is start at the beginning of the process.

Zdenek: Ronnie goodman is the demolition engineer

In charge of making it all happen.

This is not his first rodeo.

Ronnie's already demolished half-a-dozen coal power plants

And has agreed to share his trade secrets with me.

Goodman: The building you see today,

It will look similar to that the day

We implode that building.

But you'll take months and months of preparation

And then all of a sudden, they'll push the button,

Seconds later, the whole building's

Reduced to a small pile.

♪

Zdenek: Demo work is a science and a business.

There's 30,000 tons of valuable metal here.

It could be worth $10 million if you're willing

To do the hard work to get it out.

Goodman: We'll come through, all these windows will get removed

From this building here.

Turbine and generator work, condenser removal work,

That process will keep continuin' down

Towards this end of the building.

Zdenek: They're starting on the six massive boilers.

Conveniently, those are also

The first engineering innovation I want to uncover,

Down here in the dark.

♪

Throughout the 19th century, boilers were used

To create steam power on a small scale.

Archival: America is at the height of the steam age.

The steam engine is the nation's prime mover.

Zdenek: Then, from 1882, they were used

To run america's first power plants.

These were small operations with as few as 500 customers.

The engineers at buck were thinking much bigger

And revolutionized a new technology.

They saw a way to use steam to create electrical power,

Not just for a single neighborhood,

But for huge, industrial operations.

♪

Super-sized power plants with super-sized boilers.

So big, they housed them deep in the bowels of the building.

Somewhere around here, I can hear the team working hard

To cut through all that steel.

They're starting at the bottom of the boiler

And using flame cutters to slice through the enormous pipes

That supplied the boilers with water.

But cutting those pipes free is dangerous work.

(metal crashing) (chad exclaiming)

Now that's how you take apart a power plant!

So this used to be a giant pipe,

Like a three-foot diameter pipe.

It's two-and-a-half inches thick of steel

And it's at the bottom of the boiler.

They already cut off the bottom part of the pipe,

Now the guys in the crawl space are getting rid of the top.

And these pieces have got

To weigh a couple of thousand pounds each.

(metal crashing)

Wow. (laughs)

I thought I'd get hit with slag, not mud! (laughs)

Man: It's mud on your face.

Zdenek: It's crazy work in here.

It takes 10 days of hard work

And sweat just to remove the pipe work

And bottom section of the boiler.

But now, I can look right up into the combustion chamber.

Once, this huge space was filled with a giant,

Swirling fireball that burned all day long.

The space is so big, I can barely see the top of it,

120-feet above my head.

This boiler was 12 times bigger than those on the titanic

And it lasted a lot longer.

But while it was big, it also needed to be efficient.

That depended on something small, very small.

Early boilers burned coal in lumps the size of rocks

At an efficiency of just 35%.

Buck engineers were determined to do better

And discovered they could produce even

More energy from coal

If they pulverized it.

Goodman: They pulverized this coal.

And the most important thing for us is that the coal goes

From that size of a rock to a powder.

And it's really important it gets down to a powder,

Because it needs to be a powder for combustion.

Zdenek: Efficient combustion, that is.

When coal is powdered,

It means more of the carbon content is exposed.

So when it's mixed with air

And blasted into the combustion chamber,

It ignites almost instantly.

This means it burns faster and with less waste.

I mean, this is like the size of a small skyscraper in here.

And can you imagine, 1,000-degrees fahrenheit,

1800 psi,

With a giant fireball just swirling around inside of here.

All that water in the pipes turning into steam

To power the turbine.

The 26,000-square foot combustion chamber,

Lined with tens of thousands of feet of pipework,

All carrying cold water.

As the pulverized coal burned in the giant chamber,

The enormous heat generated by the inferno,

Turned the water in the pipes to steam.

When that happens, steam increases 1,000 times in volume.

It's a handy rule of physics,

Which means steam leaves the boiler under enormous pressure,

1800-pounds-per-square-inch.

That's around 20-times higher than early boiler designs.

♪

Buck's new technique quickly became the industry standard,

Increasing power production right across america.

♪

Now, chunk by chunk, the demolition team is cutting

Out the giant boilers.

Salvaging over 300-tons of steel

That could sell for up to $90,000.

Finally, after a century of service

And eight weeks of salvage, buck's boilers are no more.

♪

They're now taken to the local scrap yard for sorting.

We started tearing into the boilers

And this is all that's left.

We separated the metal into different piles

And now it's all ready to go to the recycling yard.

In the 1920s, the american economy was booming.

New wealth and consumer credit meant new markets

For luxury and household goods.

Archival: Golden america, welcome to the promised land!

Zdenek: North carolina was cotton country,

The number one textile state in the union.

To keep up with demand, its mills needed power

In bigger quantities than ever before.

Duke's local hydro-electric power plant was

Soon struggling to generate enough juice.

They needed an alternative and they needed it fast,

Which gave rise to buck steam station.

Company worker and historian paul beattie has joined me

To explain just how quickly they did it.

So you've got almost 40 years with the company,

Plus when you started working,

You were working with old timers at the time

That had been workin' since maybe the '40s-'50s.

But you're also a mechanical engineer,

So I'm hopin' that you can tell me a little bit

About the historical part of the plant.

Beattie: They built this particular plant in nine months.

Zdenek: Nine months?

Beattle: They self-performed all the work.

They had local folks that were very talented,

Very knowledgeable, from that standpoint.

It was a monumental task at the time

If you think of how quickly they made it happen.

Zdenek: When buck steam station was finished,

It could produced 80 times more juice

Than the hydro-electric plant,

Enough to power the booming mills.

But such a monster machine required serious manpower,

300 workers per shift.

♪

Duke energy also had to build a town,

They called it dukeville.

And even started their own baseball team.

The coal came in by rail,

10,000 tons of the stuff, every single day.

All delivered from up to 500 miles away

To keep buck's giant boilers burning.

But giant boilers and high-pressure steam were

Only the first step in providing power to the people.

The next next engineering innovation

That I want to uncover is the crucial invention

That turned steam into movement.

It's an invention that was so efficient

And so effective, that 100 years later,

It's still being used in modern power plants.

It's the steam turbine. ♪

Buck had six of them and they're huge!

Three months in and they're next

On the list for destruction.

The team is preparing to cut them apart and recycle them.

But it's not gonna be easy,

Each one is underneath a steel casing, three-inches thick,

Held in place by bolts so big

We need a crane to lift them out.

The covers are so heavy, we have to cut each one into pieces

Before we can move it.

After hours of cutting,

We're ready to crane out the first section.

So, we used one of the existing bolt holes

And then torched a hole in the side

So that we have an access point to attach the shackles to.

Otherwise, there's no real safe way

To lift up (laughs) 35 tons worth of metal.

To move it, we're using buck's 100-ton crane.

It was installed in 1926 to assemble the plant.

Nearly a century later,

We're using it to take the place apart.

The crane's pulleys are maneuvered inches at a time,

One false move and the giant cables could snap.

Come on!

Lift!

Come on! ♪

Ah, there it goes!

Well, we finally got the high-pressure turbine cover off

And it was really heavy, even the 100-ton crane had

To work to get the thing off.

♪

♪

The turbine casing alone weighs around 10,000 pounds.

For the salvage team, that could mean $20,000.

What I'm excited about,

Are the huge circular elements revealed inside.

They're the turbine blades

And they're really clever pieces of engineering.

A turbine works on an ancient principle,

That by moving one large wheel,

Connected to the other small wheels,

You can covert thermal energy

Into mechanical energy using moving water

Or air to turn a wheel.

Romans employed the technique to grind corn

As early as 70 b.C.

And windmills were invented over 1,000 years ago.

Both are ancestors of buck's huge turbines

Which use steam, instead of air or water,

To turn giant fan blades.

These fan blades are mounted on a central shaft.

The high-pressure steam from the boiler is pumped

Into the turbine casing.

As it's forced over the fan blades,

The steam spins the blades and drives the shaft.

♪

The person behind this invention was

Irishman, charles parsons.

He built his first steam turbine design in 1884.

The turbine operated in a series of stages,

Which drew energy out of the steam as it expanded,

Making it slower, more controllable

And less likely to wear out or break under the strain.

Steam turbines have replace pistons

For extracting power almost universally since then.

Within a few decades, it made cheap

And plentiful electricity possible

And revolutionized marine transport and naval warfare.

Parsons' invention was a breakthrough

In mechanical engineering.

It was later adopted for all major world power stations.

The earliest turbines produced

Just under eight kilowatts of power,

But the genius of that invention was

Its ability to scale up dramatically.

Here at buck, by a factor of 10,000!

Those turbines produce 80,000 kilowatts of power each.

♪

Like everything else, these rotors are super heavy.

Each one is made up of at least 15,000 pounds of steel

And they were never designed to be completely dismantled.

Carlos: Okay, take it up.

Zdenek: So this is really just the nature of the beast,

There's no written manual

On how to deconstruct those things.

We're relying on carlos and the guys' decades of experience

In taking these things apart.

There are no shortcuts here, just blowtorches and sweat.

It takes five weeks to remove the casings

And cut up each turbine.

♪

I'm back in time to help with the final unit.

This is the last turbine.

I'm gonna flame cut the bottom bolt

And then we'll be able to lift the casing out.

(torches hissing) ♪

I had to get certified to be able to use one of these.

It burns oxygen and acetylene gases

At 6,000 degrees fahrenheit.

Enough to melt solid steel in seconds.

I start by cutting through the giant bolts

That secure the thing to the floor.

(metal clanging)

All right, that's four bolts gone.

With the turbine itself gone out,

The rest of the team cuts the bottom casing into pieces

So the crane can lift them out.

We've got the crane hoisted on each side

And we got to make sure that it's not too tight.

Because if there's too much tension,

Right when they snap through that last part of the steel,

It'll pop up and can cause an injury or kill somebody.

You can tell it's heavy by how it's bending that cable, huh.

♪

There goes the last of buck steam station's six turbines.

Extraordinary pieces of engineering that started to turn

At a critical time in the nation's history.

♪

The plant's builders won their nine month race

To keep up with north carolina's textile boom.

But just as their hard work was paying off, disaster struck.

The great depression brought industry to its knees.

In the crisis, the federal government stepped in,

Realizing that infrastructure projects, like buck,

Could power a lot more than textile mills.

Across the country, armies of men built new power lines

That connected everyone to the grid.

Up to 500 miles of cable went up every day.

First, major textile mills were connected.

Followed by tobacco companies and then homes,

Building up the national grid.

♪

♪

Today, we're nearly half way through

This year-long demolition process.

The team has removed buck's six giant boilers

And its huge turbines,

Together, over 500 tons of steel, copper and brass.

That's up to $1 million of scrap at today's prices.

Next on the chopping block,

Are the power plants mighty generators.

They transformed the energy

From the spinning turbines into electricity.

And like everything else at buck, they're big.

Without these generators,

America's electrical revolution might never have happened.

Today, these are big value pieces of salvage,

Loaded with precious metals like copper, nickel and brass.

The turbine converts high-pressure steam

Into mechanical energy.

Now it's this generator that will convert

That mechanical energy into electricity.

It sounds like magic, but actually,

It's the engineering inspiration

Of a british inventor named michael faraday.

♪

In 1831, he discovered that moving a coil of wire

Within a magnetic field produces an electrical current.

When it comes to working with electricity,

No other metal is better than copper.

When a high-voltage current passes through a wire,

There's a constant rise and fall in temperature.

Not every metal can take such heat change, but copper can.

It's also very elastic, which means it's perfect

To wind into a coil around this generator shaft.

Almost 200 years later, generators have been made

More efficient and built to huge specs,

But the concept remains the same.

♪

This generator has a copper coil surrounded

By giant magnets.

The coil is mounted on a shaft connected

To the spinning turbine.

Which is at constant speed with more steam,

Meaning more load until it hits the max.

That copper coil's made to spin

Inside of that magnetic field

And that creates an electrical current ready

To send to the electrical grid.

Now these huge generators are ready for the recycling yard.

But first, all that high-price metal has

To be salvaged from inside them.

I've been told that's my job

And to make sure none of it gets left behind.

All right, this is the rotor

Out of one of the last generators,

And this thing is spinning inside the

Generator at 1800 rpm.

It's actually a steel shaft that's covered in copper.

Now the copper's very expensive when it comes to recycling,

So we're gonna take this off

And it's gonna go to a different recycling yard

Than the steel goes to.

♪ (chisel buzzing)

Copper's worth two-and-a-half times as much as steel

Because it's very flexible

And can withstand big changes in temperature.

That makes it ideal for carrying electrical current.

There are thousands of pounds of copper in these generators.

I've been told to pry it free

And that the only way to do that is by hand.

But with just a crowbar, it ain't easy.

Bueno! (sighs)

It was a lot of hard work,

But it's about 25 pounds of copper.

So this whole thing's got about 11,000 pounds,

So it's worthwhile to separate it

So we can send it to a different yard.

♪

It took a long time to free just that one, 25-pound strip.

At this rate, it'll take me about six weeks

To do all of them.

And that's when I realized the guys were

Just makin' fun of the new kid.

It turns out, the real pros use mini digger.

All right, these guys were treating me like rookie,

There's a much faster way to do it.

We're gonna use some heavy equipment to do it,

Nothing like a bobcat, and we should be able

To take out three or four of them at a time.

♪

Through the 1930s, '40s and '50s,

Generators like these were installed

Into at least one new power station every month.

By 1960, 600 new coal power plants had opened

And america went from producing almost no electricity,

To generating four trillion kilowatt hours every year.

Whether you live in the city or the country,

Your life was now transformed.

Electricity changed cooking,

Music,

Leisure,

Entertainment

And thanks to some very clever engineering,

It was something everyone could afford.

♪

There's a reason this power station was built

So close to the river.

Coal power plants, they need huge volumes of water

In order to operate efficiently.

Remember, it's the water in the pipes lining the boilers

That becomes the pressurized steam that powers the turbines.

Buck used giant machines to do that

More efficiently than ever before.

They are the next innovation

I want to get inside, the condensers.

There are six in the plant,

Each one is a giant tank, 30-feet tall and 40-feet deep.

Plenty big enough for me to crawl inside.

When the power plant was operating,

This would have been sealed off

And filled with water and thousands of pipes.

The pipes carry cold water in from the river.

When the spent steam from the turbine is pumped

Into the tank, the hot steam hits the cold pipes

And it condenses back into water.

Which is fed back to the boiler,

So the whole process can begin again.

This is the ultimate recycling process

And key to the work of a power plant like buck.

It made the process of generating electricity at buck

Even more efficient, keeping costs down

And electricity as affordable as possible.

Now taking them apart is gonna take a lot of work.

♪

They're so big, we have to start 20-feet up.

The pipes are each made of stainless steel.

Because that's rust-proof,

It's worth top dollar as recycling.

And worth the sweat of salvaging separately

To the rest of the condenser.

Hey, raphael. Raphael: How you doing?

Zdenek: Good, how are you? Raphael: Good!

Zdenek: It looks like an endless job,

And maybe not one I should have volunteered for.

Man, that's a lot of pipes!

Raphael: There's about 2500 in this space right here.

Zdenek: And you gotta take every one out, one-by-one.

Raphael: One-by-one, yep.

Zdenek: We have a custom-built machine to help.

It has jaws that grab the pipe and then pull it out.

But it's still gonna take a lot

Of heavy and repetitive work.

Each pipe is 20-feet long, weighs about eight pounds

And is worth around $5 as scrap.

Not much, but when you've got 15,000 of them,

Removing them one-by-one begins to make sense.

Once we've pulled each pipe,

We feed it into a guillotine,

Where it's cut into pieces ready for melt-down.

(guillotine clicking)

♪

With the condensers' pipes removed,

The steel outer casings are cut into chunks

And lifted to ground level, ready for the salvage yard.

Another huge piece of buck power plant stripped away.

♪

After seven months of work,

The team has salvaged almost 3,000 tons of metal.

We've removed the six boilers, turbines,

Generators and condensers.

Together, a mighty machine, which for 80 years,

Harnessed the power of coal to generate electricity.

And help drive america's growth through the 20th century.

By the 1970s, it was clear,

Burning coal came at a cost.

Archival: Wherever fuel is burned to generate power,

The inevitable, unavoidable result is pollution.

Zdenek: Dangerous gases and heavy metals released

Into the atmosphere.

Sulfur dioxide, that creates acid rain.

Nitrogen oxide, which causes smog.

Mercury, that contaminates waterways, killing wildlife.

And soot, which can trigger asthma and bronchitis.

Buck power plant had helped changed america,

But the dark side of coal power could no longer be ignored.

The u.S. Government responded

By introducing the clean air act,

Designed to reduce pollution

By enforcing new standards for industry.

♪

In response, duke energy built these.

They're called precipitators and inside,

There's some pretty cool engineering.

The precipitators stretch 110 feet,

The entire height of the building.

Inside each one is an array of metal plates,

Charged with static electricity.

Exhaust gases from the boilers are pumped

Into the precipitator.

These gases are laden with particles

Of ash and poisonous metals.

As this mixture passes between the metal plates,

The static electrical charge attracts

The dangerous particles, so that they cling to the metal

While the gases release into the atmosphere.

Vibration then frees the ash

So that it can be collected below.

Now, it's time to tear them down.

Brad: Roberto and ricardo, y'all are gonna be machine operators,

Supportin' tommy lean and long arm.

You ready, you're work trucks full, ready to go?

Man: Yep.

Zdenek: And normally, they might just blow out the legs

And take the whole thing down in one piece,

But we can't do that here

Because we have an active switch yard.

All the transformers and high-voltage lines over there,

All that's active and you can see,

It's dangerously close to where our precipitator is.

So instead, we're gonna use an excavator,

It's basically this 100-foot arm with shears

On the end that bite down,

And take this structure down, piece by piece.

It takes a lot longer, but it's much more controlled,

Because we don't want anything falling

Into that electrical over there.

It seems almost a bit like david and goliath. (laughs)

This monster precipitator (laughs)

And this guy working this one machine down here.

(metal clanging) (excavator creaking)

This is amazing to see this process.

I mean, you lose perspective.

We're about 200 feet away and he's literally shearing

Through I-beams to take this apart.

(metal clanging) ♪

For three whole days,

The excavators huge jaws tear at the precipitators

Until eventually, the giant machines are reduced to scrap.

About a month ago, we started taking apart the precipitators

With the excavator and this is all that's left.

We've separated all the metal into different piles

To get it ready for recycling.

♪

98% of this metal will be melted down, sold and used again.

Inside the building,

I'm helping to clear the very last pieces of salvaged steel.

Getting these giant chunks

Of scrap offsite requires heavy haulage.

So how much would you say these weigh?

Elberson: 20,000.

Zdenek: Each?

Elberson: This one's 20, that one's about 15.

Zdenek: So we're puttin' the shackles on, we got four of 'em.

We had to put two extras on the other side

To help level it out,

'cause we're grabbing a lot lower end of the piece there

And we got to make it fairly even for the main lift.

Time for the big crane.

When you're movin' 25,000 pounds worth of steel,

You got to make sure you do it right.

So you got two chains on each one?

Elberson: Yep.

Zdenek: And then that's it, we're good to go?

Elberson: They're good to go.

Zdenek: Now I've designed jets for spaceships

And built engines for cars,

But one thing I've never done is ride in an 18-wheeler.

I'm tryin' not to be too excited here,

This is my first time in a big rig.

Elberson: Hey, it's exciting.

Zdenek: (laughs) I know it's probably old hat for you,

But this is pretty damn cool.

Elberson: I've been in them for 34 years

And it's still exciting.

(chad laughing)

Zdenek: So can you feel how heavy the load is

Or does it feel the same regardless of the weight?

Elberson: You can tell the difference

'cause most of what we do is oversized and overweight

And so you can really tell.

The heavier it gets, the more you can feel in the truck.

Zdenek: Really, huh.

(dispatcher muttering)

Zdenek: Every day for the last year,

Trucks like this have been leaving buck,

Carrying giant chunks of scrap down the highway.

We're driving down the interstate

With about 25,000 pounds of steel,

Heading off to the recycling yard.

And I'm really excited to be in this big rig,

Never done it before and super grateful

For jake takin' me on the ride.

To one of the biggest salvage yards in the state.

It's where the other side

Of the demolition business takes place,

Storing and selling the 30,000 tons of metal,

Salvaged from the buck site.

You're talkin' about acres and acres of land over here,

I don't even know how big it is, but it's huge.

And they've got it down to a science

On how they separate things, weigh it all out

And put it in different piles.

Then, literally timing the market

For when it's good to offload it.

It's a pretty impressive operation for sure.

I recognized some parts here from buck.

Cavanaugh: Yeah, you've got, this is one of the main staters.

And then up there, of course,

You got either some of the high

Or low-pressure rotors that we took out.

Zdenek: So on the pieces that we're bringin' in today,

We'll unload it right here

And these guys will start choppin' it up?

Cavanaugh: Yep, they'll unload it with the crane here.

They'll prepare it, get it mill ready,

Then they'll load it on the truck, ship it out.

Zdenek: Wow.

Cavanaugh: Steel prices fluctuate,

So we wait for a good time in the market.

We've got a big enough yard

And we're fortunate enough that we can stockpile some of it.

Zdenek: Most of the scrap metal will eventually be melted down

And turned into building materials,

Like steel girders for construction.

The haul of metal from buck is enough

To forge 40,000 feet of I-beams,

Or four-and-a-half thousand sheets of one-inch steel.

In fact, 2/3 of the steel we use

In america has been recycled from salvaged metal like this.

It's hard to imagine that this stuff was actually built

Almost 100 years ago, and here we are a century later,

Taking it all apart and it, soon enough,

Is going to be reused for the next century.

♪

Buck steam station was a marvel of its age.

When it was built, it was a highly efficient power plant,

Using cutting-edge technology.

Today, it's a dinosaur.

The precipitators stopped 99% of harmful particles

From reaching the atmosphere,

But those pollutants weren't eradicated.

Instead, they were collected in the form

Of millions of tons of ash,

Which then had to be disposed of elsewhere.

Here at buck, that was done by digging giant pits,

Called ash ponds.

Water was used to move the ash to a series of these ponds

And then that ash would settle to the bottom.

But over time, toxins seeped into the local groundwater.

The pollution caused by burning coal was not going away

And that's one reason buck steam station was

Finally decommissioned in 2013.

Newer, cleaner ways of producing electricity are taking

The place of coal-fired plants.

This is the new buck power plant.

It doesn't burn coal, instead it's powered by natural gas.

It produces twice the power more cheaply

With far fewer pollutants than its neighbor ever did.

♪

The 620-megawatt natural gas plant began operating in 2011.

The natural gas is fed through a pipeline from new mexico.

It's cleaner, cheaper, twice as powerful

And can be run by a team of just 20 people.

But the technology proved at buck lives on.

There are still turbines, condensers and generators,

Engineering innovations that continue to evolve

And stand the test of time.

♪

It's a considerable legacy.

One man who's proud of the role buck played

In powering the modern age is dean beaver.

Beaver: It's been a good long career.

Zdenek: He spent his entire working life here.

Beaver: 35 years spent with the team makin' this place run

And five years of watchin' it cut up and torn down.

Zdenek: I think most people think of demo

And, okay, you get a wrecking ball, some explosives

And you take the whole building down.

But something like this, it's amazing, it takes years.

Beaver: It does and like I said, we do it safely

And environmentally safe.

I've talked to people from other plants,

They said the big one will come when they implode it.

Zdenek: Really?

Beaver: They said that's when you'll really feel it.

Zdenek: It hits home then.

Well, dean, I think it's safe to say

That you've earned that retirement.

Beaver: (sighs) I'm ready for it, it's been a good career.

Zdenek: We've reached the end of the road

For the buck steam station.

In just a few days, it will all come crashing down.

♪

After 12 solid months of salvage,

The demolition team is now setting explosive charges

To bring buck steam station's empty shell crashing down.

This coal power plant's era is truly over.

For the past several months,

I've been given an amazing insight

Into the world of demolition.

What stands out, is the attention to detail

In taking apart such a giant structure.

The careful planning, the way the teams extract

Every cents worth of metal from the building for recycling.

Duke has handed the site over to steve pettigrew,

The blast engineer in charge of the operation.

He's been working with explosives for over 40 years

And he takes his business seriously.

I'm one of the lucky few allowed access

Before the big explosion.

So, steve, what does it take

To take down a structural building of this size?

Pettigrew: Well, being a structural steel building,

We use linear shape charges,

Which actually target the steel flanges

And they penetrate and sever the steel,

Just like a torch would, only in milliseconds.

Zdenek: So we've got the low shape charges down here,

Cutting low, and then the high ones up there?

Pettigrew: Yes, exactly.

Zdenek: And how to you actually kick this thing out

Once it's cut?

Pettigrew: That severance is made low and high.

The kick charge goes off, which is a slower explosive

And it actually eliminates the column.

Zdenek: So, again, for a building of this size,

How many charges or explosives would you need

To take the building down?

Pettigrew: We have 350 charges, ranging from smaller charges

To medium and some extra-heavy charges.

Zdenek: So it's really down to the second

On getting this thing down.

Pettigrew: Well, it's the precise millisecond.

Zdenek: Millisecond. Pettigrew: Yes, millisecond.

Zdenek: So it's gotta be engineered

So that the cuts are made

Where they need to be, and then the final cut is done

By the shape charge. Pettigrew: Exactly.

Zdenek: Which will bring this whole thing down.

Pettigrew: Yeah, over time and space.

Zdenek: So that's the traditional big boom explosives

That we think of. Pettigrew: Right.

Zdenek: So, those will kick this thing out,

Almost like the leg of a chair, so that once these are gone,

The weight of the building brings it down?

Pettigrew: Exactly, gravity takes over.

Zdenek: This place is rigged and ready to blow.

We've got 350 explosive charges set

And if all goes according to plan,

This should drop like a house of cards and land right here.

So I'm gonna head up to the command center.

♪

The command center is a safe zone,

3/4 of a mile away from the blast site.

(sirens blasting)

All right, we got a lot of people here. (laughs)

This is the first command center

With the second command center back there

And then the viewing area behind that.

There's a couple hundred people up there

And we just heard the three blasts,

Which is the five minute warning.

This is about to happen.

And some things, despite technology,

Don't change a whole lot.

We still got a red terminal and a black terminal

(laughs) and one button to push

And that building's comin' down.

♪

I begged and pleaded, but supervisor, javier,

Gets to press the button,

Bringing the station crashing to the ground.

Pettigrew: Six, five, four, three, two, one, fire.

Zdenek: Wait for it.

(explosions blasting)

First, the shape charges explode,

Cutting off the top and bottom of the beams.

Then, the conventional big boom charges kick

Out the whole beam like the leg of a chair,

Causing the weight of the building to come crashing down.

(explosions blasting) (metal crashing)

After the dust settles, a mammoth building is reduced

To a pile of rubble, ending the buck coal-fired era.

The site where the steam station stood will become

A grassy field after it's graded.

♪

All that's left of the plant is the $10 million they made

In recycled metal.

For almost 100 years,

The buck power plant has provided electricity

And a way of life for millions of americans.

I know its time has come,

But buck's engineering made it a legend of its time.

Now, it's demolished and it's time to say goodbye

To an incredible piece of history.

♪