boom

Boom.

This shows what’s left of the Nashville Thermal Transfer plant, which is (was) right across the street from my old apartment. They detonated the big smokestack this morning. This is what it looked like before the demolition.

The plant was built in 1973 as part of Nashville’s District Energy System, to provide heat for the downtown area by burning more than 1,000 tons of trash a day.

I had been told as a kid that it was a geothermal plant, a conviction I never questioned until recently. It was rather disappointing to find out it just burns garbage, and ineffeciently at that. I don’t feel as bad as my friend Daniel, though, who told me he always thought it was a Colgate toothpaste factory.