Willamette Falls Past and Future

A few days ago I had the experience of touring the former Blue Heron Paper Plant, at Oregon City, with members of the media, to discuss this history of this incredible site at the Willamette Falls on the eastern shore of the river.  This is the place, in the 1820s, where Dr. John McLaughlin established what would become the capital of the Oregon Territory.  The Falls have been a draw since prehistoric times and as the second largest waterfall, by volume, in the United States (after Niagara), they quickly became the focus of a variety of Oregon’s earliest industries.  McLaughlin himself had a small race cut out of the bedrock to power a sawmill and by 1865 what became the Oregon Woolen Mills was located here.  In 1908, having left his position at what is now the West Linn Paper Company, across the river, W. P. Hawley established his own firm, the Hawley Pulp and Paper Company, on McLaughlin’s old claim and soon was producing 200,000 tons of paper products on a daily basis.

Willamette Falls, from the old Hawley Powerhouse site, June 2012

Hawley built a booming business, based on his own decades of expertise, a ready supply of timber, and the abundant power of the Willamette Falls.  He rented PGE’s old “Station A” out at the head of the falls, built his own buildings for paper machines and mills, and the business spread out along Oregon’s Main Street, sharing the block with a hotel, a laundry and McLaughlin’s decrepit house.  As he grew the business (and gave the house to the city, which moved it up the hill), Hawley’s structures became larger, more sturdy (concrete, not wood) and slowly took over the entire block.  In the late 1920s Hawley built two new massive, concrete and glass buildings on the east side of the street  (known as Mill B and Paper Machine No. 4), creating a clean streetscape of multi-story industral buildings.  Eventually Hawley's paper company took over the old Woolen Mill property too, occupying over twenty acres lining everything on both sides of Main Street between the railroad line and the river.

Hawley sold the business to Publisher’s Paper in the 1940s and then a series of ownership changes in the 1980s and 90s culminated with the formation of employee-owned Blue Heron Paper Company, which sadly closed its doors about a year ago.  The future of the site is unclear, though Metro has expressed interest in providing the public better access to “Niagara of the Pacific.”  That is why the media was interested and that is why there is a lot of discussion on-going about the opportunities, and the liabilities, that result from over 180 years of industrial uses.  Last week, on Wednesday, it was a beautiful day at the Willamette Falls.  A lot of people are working to try figure out to create a situation where more Oregonians can enjoy the view McLaughlin did.

Penstocks of the Past, and Future

Having spent most of mid-April dealing with the high style design issues of the Holly Theatre, this past week has seen a return to the more typical aspects of report writing, including covered bridges and compliance documentation.  Staring back at me from my computer screen at the moment is PGE’s Faraday Powerhouse, on the Clackamas River.  

“Penstocks” are the feeder tubes that connect a reservoir to the turbines that spin a generator to create electricity.  They are usually large concrete or steel pipes that drop significantly in elevation to create “head,” increasing the force of the water and spinning the turbines efficiently.  In more recent projects (post-WWII) penstocks are typically underwater, at the bottom of a dam, and so unseen.  But in an early hydro project, like that at Faraday (which was built in 1907-1909), the penstocks are exposed and become highly visible features, dropping from the crest of the dam, down an embankment, to the powerhouse.  Faraday's penstocks are typical, in that these early powerhouses tend to have multiple, smaller, generation units rather than one or two large ones, and so the penstock lines can be pretty dramatic through repetition. At Faraday there are six penstocks, five built by 1909 and one, Unit No. 6 (the larger one, at the extreme right above), that was added in 1956. 

Faraday’s original penstocks are of riveted steel, between eight and nine feet in diameter, and are supported by multiple concrete piers with small semi-circular “saddles” where they meet the steel penstock itself.  This has worked well for over a century, but where the concrete and the steel meet, water is trapped.  Steel and water are a bad mix, and one thing you surely do not want is a weak, rusted, spot in steel tube carrying 1/6 of the Clackamas River at high pressure.

PGE has creatively developed a solution to repair the damaged spots and then modify the top of the concrete piers to re-seat the penstocks with a steel-to-steel connection.  This will reduce the potential for damage and allow the Faraday penstocks to continue to operate into their second century. 

People tend to glaze over when I talk about my interest in hydroelectric generation, penstocks, flow lines and the like and many of these early projects are criticized as unnecessary and un-green.  That's another rant.  Last night I was amused, while watching NBC's filmed-in-Portland fantasy-drama show Grimm, to see that PGE's now-decommissioned Bull Run Powerhouse (built prior to WWI) played a major role.  It’s a shame, and an interesting comment on how our society has changed, that only few people still see the postcard potential in engineering marvels like these early, small scale, powerhouse projects.  Think about that during the next power outage, or when you drive through a sea of wind turbines.

Steam Makes Things Spin

Over the years I have been involved with many projects that generate electricity, mostly hydro projects, but also Oregon’s only nuclear project, the Trojan Plant, near St. Helens.  In general there are only a few basic forms of making electricity.  You can use nature in the form of water or wind to spin a turbine (which spins the generator), in recent years you can use the sun to directly create electricity through photo voltaics, or you can generate steam to turn the generators.  There are lots of ways to create steam; you can tap it geothermally or you can create heat, which boils water.  HOW you create the heat is the main difference between most forms of generation other than solar, wind, or hydro.  At root most generation is centered around what amounts to a big tea kettle...the boiler, than can be fired by coal, by wood waste or hog fuel, by natural gas, or by a nuclear reaction.  At its core even the Trojan Plant, which people somehow envision as using some primal natural force (an atomic reaction) to create massive amounts of power was far more mundane....it was using all the heat generated by that reaction to create high pressure steam to spin a generator.  Exactly the same process as burning coal, or wood, just far more efficient and on a far larger scale (and yes, with a more complex waste product...but that isn’t the point of this little discourse). 

The more common way to create steam power for electric generation is to burn coal, and that is what most of America, without the plentiful waterways of the Pacific Northwest, does to power its computers and recharge its IPODs.  Coal is abundant, but it’s not generally considered green, and most steam plants in the Northwest now burn natural gas. 

Last month I toured one of Oregon’s few remaining steam plants of any sort, one built in 1930 to burn bunker oil, added to in the 1940s and 1950s to burn sawdust and wood-chips, and today burning natural gas.  EWEB’s Standby Steam Plant, located right in downtown Eugene, is also interesting that while it was designed to produce electricity (burning material to raise the temperature of water to turn one of its three generators), it was later converted (in 1962) to actually create, well, steam, that was directly transmitted around the downtown to heat various private and public buildings.  For the moment, the newest unit at the plant still does just that but all the earlier units remain in place, just as they were designed, and so the plant functions as something of a textbook of steam plant generation technology between 1930 and 1950.  I am enjoying researching, and documenting, the operation of this historic facility as part of EWEB’s decommissioning the facility.  It sure makes for some great images...the interiors of mid-20^th century industrial facilities are nothing if not photogenic!