Our next stop after visiting with the McCoys (and no Hatfields that we could see!), we continued up the same road to the site of the Hutsonville Power Station.
Grandpa Williams worked as a turbine operator at what was then Central Illinois Public Service (CIPS) Company’s coal-fired electricity generation plant right on the banks of the Wabash River. In fact, it was one of those turbines that decided that Grandpa only needed nine fingers by taking off one of his index fingers but when he played piano, you’d never know he was missing one usually vital finger for playing!
I had always thought it was a hydro-electric facility given it’s proximity to the river and that cheap hydro-electric power is very common in Illinois.
It turns out they were actually burning high-sulfer bituminous coal from southern Illinois and Indiana until switching over to a blend of coal from the Powder River basin.
Ironically, the power plant was named one of the top power plants and inducted into a hall of fame in 2009 for plants burning Powder River coal but the enormous costs of retrofitting the two operating units to much stricter sulfur scrubbers was what ultimately doomed the plant to closure in 2011 and final demolition in 2015.
It seems somewhat shocking that we were able to drive right through an unsecured fence and into the facility property and all you can see is an electrical substation that stood just to the west of where the actual plant building stood.
The mound guarding the front entrance was where they’d spread the coal ash from the combustion chambers and douse it with huge water sprinklers (water cannons, more like!) before the ash would end up in a couple of settling ponds.
