Say goodbye to the Sinclair smokestack

The City Council Tuesday night unanimously gave up on saving the historic smokestack at the former Sinclair meatpacking plant.

Council members Justin Shields and Don Karr, advocates for saving the smokestack, said it was time to take it down.

“The writing is on the wall,” said council member Monica Vernon, another stack backer.

The council was reacting to a report from Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, who said stabilizing the stack would require taking the top 100 feet of the smokestack apart, brick by brick.

The stabilization process would delay the current demolition of the Sinclair plant, he said.

The demolition crews have now reached a point in demolition where they are in danger of being hit by the stack should it fall during the plant demolition, Eyerly told the council.

Eyerly said an engineering firm had intended to enter the top of the stack on Monday to examine the inside of it. But it was too unstable, he said. Instead, he said, the firm dropped a camera into the stack.

Eyerly put the cost at $740,000 to stabilize the stack, said it would cost $1 million to restore it and he said the Federal Emergency Management Agency would not pay for some of the demolition of the rest of the plant if the demolition ceases for now. He put that loss at $1 million.

He put the total cost to the city at $2.74 million to stop demolition on the site for a time, to stabilize it and restore it.