“It’s go­ing down, I’m yelling ‘Tim­ber’.”

No, they’re not ac­tu­al­ly made of tim­ber, but the lines of Pit­bull’s pop­u­lar song by the same name come to mind as work­men have start­ed on the de­com­mis­sioned Pow­er­gen fa­cil­i­ty in Port-of-Spain, which will even­tu­al­ly re­sult in the re­moval of the pop­u­lar tow­ers.

With cranes al­ready tak­ing apart parts of the fa­cil­i­ty, a re­cent Pow­er­gen up­date stat­ed the fol­low­ing:

“Stand­ing promi­nent­ly across the Port of Spain skies, four fa­mil­iar stacks have guid­ed com­muters for decades as they head west­ward as they veered off of Wright­son Road on­to Colville Street. A new chap­ter in Port of Spain’s his­to­ry is about to be writ­ten as The Pow­er Gen­er­a­tion Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed (Pow­er­Gen) gets ready to de­con­struct and de­mol­ish these city icons.

Phase One of the ‘Pow­er­Gen POS De­com­mis­sion­ing Project’ got un­der­way last June, when the com­pa­ny held a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion with its host com­mu­ni­ty ahead of scaf­fold­ing and abate­ment works to re­move reg­u­lat­ed in­dus­tri­al ma­te­ri­als present with­in the plant.

The com­plet­ed sched­ule of works in­clud­ed the de-en­er­gis­ing, de­com­mis­sion­ing and dis­con­nec­tion of elec­tri­cal in­ter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty with the na­tion­al grid and abate­ment works.

This re­quired a rig­or­ous pre-work as­sess­ment of po­ten­tial so­cial, safe­ty and en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pacts, pub­lic con­sul­ta­tions, and the re­quired ap­provals from the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA), and oth­er reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies.

Lo­cal con­tent and ex­per­tise has been a key fo­cus of the project with abate­ment works be­ing con­duct­ed by Green En­gi­neer­ing.

The com­pa­ny is await­ing reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals from the EMA to com­mence Phase Two ac­tiv­i­ties, which will be pre­ced­ed by our next Pub­lic Con­sul­ta­tion with neigh­bour­ing res­i­dents and oth­er key stake­hold­ers.”