LAKELAND MCINTOSH POWER PLANT DEMOLITION

Winning It on Transparency

There’s a race to the bottom in demolition. Contractors chase the lowest bid, and corners get cut on safety or schedule to make the numbers work. Total Wrecking takes the opposite approach on all projects, including this one performed for Lakeland Electric.

We earned the plant’s trust with proof. First came a verified safety record, showing a long run of similar jobs finished above OSHA standards and without incident. We paired it with a full project history covering everything we’d done since the company started in 2013, from abatement to asset recovery. Then, after site walkthroughs and weeks studying the McIntosh documentation, we delivered a full strategy proposal that laid out exactly how the job would run and in what order, with the hazards and the timeline fully mapped out.

Asset Recovery

Before demolition began, we identified and salvaged assets with resale value, and even stripped the protective copper coating off one unit’s wiring for an early revenue stream. With our value-engineered work plan, we were able to provide the client with an asset-recovery share that offered Lakeland Electric up to $1.2 million in savings.

The Three Units

The job was centered around three coal-fired units that had run for more than 40 years.

Unit 1 is the smallest, a 90 MW generator that started on oil and was later converted to natural gas. It’s the last one we dismantled.

Unit 2 is larger, a 114.7 MW dual-fuel unit that runs on oil or natural gas, laid out as four short stacks in a compact rectangle. A May 2017 explosion knocked it out of service and led to its full decommissioning, so it was handed over to us already retired and waiting to be dismantled.

Unit 3 was the largest. Total Wrecking crews and plant leadership both called it the mothership of the station, a 360 MW coal-fired generator that made power for hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across Lakeland before the city took it offline in April 2022.

It carried everything a coal unit needed to run: the boiler and turbine, the precipitators and scrubbers that cleaned its flue gas, its own transformers, the conveyor that fed it coal, and a cooling tower built from 13 short stacks with a smaller two-stack building beside it. You could see it from the far shore of Lake Parker, and taking it down was the centerpiece of the whole project.

Working Around a Live Plant

We were contracted to remove part of a power station while the remainder of the plant operations stayed active. Every work plan was focused on maintaining a safe and operational environment that kept all equipment protected and running.

The clearest example is the switchyard next to Unit 3. It had to stay operational for the duration of our project and continue operating once the project was complete. This switchyard was a stone’s throw from the unit being demolished.

Total Wrecking repurposed a large double pipeline, once used to carry water to the cooling towers at the plant, as a physical barrier to shield the switchyard during the demolition of Unit 3. Once Unit 3 was demolished, that pipeline was removed as well.