Bellingham waterfront building demolition in full swing

The skeleton of the tallest remaining building on the city’s waterfront was in dramatic view as crews worked to take down the structure the second week of November.

Crews from Rhine Demolition of Tacoma made serious progress removing the brick walls of the digester building Wednesday and Thursday, Nov. 11 and 12.

With the walls gone, the building’s massive digester tanks were exposed and visible to people who may never have had the chance to see them before.

Workers will continue to take down the building in 10-hour shifts, Monday through Thursday, said Adam Fulton, senior project engineer at the Port of Bellingham.

Once the brick and walls are totally removed, the frame will be cut in pieces and dropped to the ground to be removed from the site, Fulton said.

“It’ll be taken down piece by piece with the use of high-reach metal shears that are mounted on an excavator,” Fulton said. “They are moving ahead of schedule, faster than the contract time, so I suspect they’ll be done around New Year’s, give or take a week.”

The digester was one of two buildings Rhine is removing from the site by the end of January; The other was the bark and chipper building, where logs were stripped of their bark and turned into chips in one of the processes of the Georgia-Pacific Corp. pulp and tissue operations.

The giant metal digester tanks, now exposed to the elements, were once used to turn wood chips into pulp using acid and steam when the pulp mill was still in operation.

The three oldest tanks will remain standing for the foreseeable future, Fulton said. The motor and chipping wheel, along with some other elements of the bark and chipper building, remain standing and will be preserved as “robust industrial icons” to be featured in displays as the waterfront is redeveloped.

As with the other demolitions that have already taken place on the waterfront, the plan is to recycle as many of the materials in the buildings as possible.

By weight, 95 percent of the previous buildings were recycled — mostly brick, steel and concrete. The steel is sold to be melted down, and the bricks and concrete are broken down and stockpiled on the site to be used as fill during later development.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Bellingham waterfront building demolition in full swing."