Wake Forest landmark will soon vanish

Just as the Binkley Chapel steeple has been a Wake Forest landmark, visible from Stony Hill Road to the west, so too the chimney for the heating plant has been part of the landscape – and for longer than the chapel steeple.

But the chimney will be gone by mid-August.

“It is being removed for safety reasons,” Ryan Hutchinson, the executive vice president for operations at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, said. “Since the building is no longer used for central heating, the smokestack is being removed for safety and maintenance purposes. The old central heating building will remain, and will be used for storage. The 1960s boilers are still in place but will be dismantled over the next year. The project to remove the smokestack is expected to take around six to eight weeks.”

The coal-fired steam plant with its chimney was built in 1924, and the chimney was taller at the time. Hutchinson said the chimney deteriorated over the years and it was reduced in height a few times. Today it stands at 105 feet.

The steam plant provided heat to all the Wake Forest College buildings through a network of underground pipes. In the 1960s, a few years after the seminary bought the campus, the plant was converted to natural gas as the fuel. Then from the mid-1990s on, the seminary has been slowly converting buildings to individual gas boilers or other forms of heat.

“Up until last all, the only buildings left on the old central heating plant were the Library, Stealey, Appleby, Binkley, and the Ledford Center. The seminary undertook a $1M project to put in three new steam boilers on the campus to address the heating needs of those new buildings. Therefore, the central heating plan was abandoned all together for heating purposes this past fall,” Hutchinson said.

The seminary has hired Gerard Chimney Company from St. Louis, Missouri, to deconstruct the chimney. The workers on site this week and next are employees of a second contractor, Enpuricon based Apex. Enpuricon specializes in asbestos and lead abatement, mold remediation and other services.

The workers are constructing a scaffolding which will reach to the top of the chimney by the middle of next week. Then they will cover the entire edifice with a tent, a large reinforced poly sheet that will look something like a very, very big sock.

The tent will contain the dirt and dust as the Enpuricon crew removes the paint from the outside of the chimney. The paint has a small amount of asbestos, and special precautions are necessary while removing it, which will take between three and four weeks.

Once the paint is removed, the envelop or tent and the scaffolding will be removed, and we can all watch while the Gerard Chimney crew takes down the chimney, brick by brick, pushing the removed sections into the center of the smoke stack. All the rubble will be contained within the chimney itself. Then the debris is all hauled away.

Photos by Dave Parrish