Almost 15 years after it was last used and nearly a century after it was first built, Hudbay has begun demolishing the company’s former smelter facility.
Company representatives announced the work had begun during a public meeting at the Flin Flon Community Hall Nov. 27, detailing a plan that will take well over a year to complete.
Demolition work on some buildings part of the smelter complex began last month and is still ongoing. The anode building has been fully demolished, with demolition on the converter aisle currently underway. Hudbay representatives say they expect the converter aisle and furnace area all demolished by Christmas this year and material ready to be moved away by rail in early 2025.
In total, demolition work on former smelter buildings is expected to continue until spring 2026.
“This is a huge safety risk for our employees. It’s been sitting there for the last 15 years becoming more and more derelict, so we wanted to start to reduce this hazard. It’s part of our closure plan,” said Chris Faktor, the site manager for Hudbay’s Flin Flon area facilities.
Demolition crews will work from west to east at first, then from north to south, demolishing buildings that were part of the complex.
“It reduces our closure cost liabilities and it’s about a 15-20 month project,” said Faktor.
While portions of the former smelter are either coming down or have already, the smokestack itself is not part of the plan. Faktor said that the stack, 50 years after it was first put into operation, will stay standing and does not have any current structural issues.
“The stack, right now, is still going to stay. There are no plans to remove the stack at this point in time. We did have an integrity inspection done on the stack this summer and it’s still got a clean bill of health,” Faktor said, adding in that the company doesn’t plan to allow visitors to tour the now-disused stack facility.
Hudbay has hired Winnipeg-based Rakowski Cartage and Wrecking, the same company that demolished the former Flin Flon Aqua Centre in 2020, the Flin Flon water tower in 2022 and several buildings on Main Street earlier this year, to do the job.
The smelter itself had run in some form or another in Flin Flon since 1930, not long after the community was first founded. The facility used high temperatures and melting down ore to extract copper from within it. Pollution that came from that process was expelled out the top of smoke stacks - first two smaller ones, then from out the top of the 250-metre-tall monolith Flin Flonners have seen for five decades.
After years of rumoured closures, the smelter shut down for good in June 2010. Workers were either laid off, moved elsewhere within Hudbay’s operations or accepted retirement packages, the smoke stack was capped and the infamous thick, yellow “smelter smoke” that covered Flin Flon at times was no more. Since the closure, the smelter buildings have sat, vacant and unused, on the main Hudbay property for almost 15 years.
While the former smelter buildings are being demolished, the company does not plan to demolish buildings with the former zinc plant and mill - the facilities could still be used if Hudbay is able to pull minerals from its own tailings facility, as the company is pursuing doing. Some parts of the facility, as well as items from the cellhouse, were sold off by Hudbay at auction in 2022. While the zinc plant and mill can still in theory provide value to or process future Hudbay projects, the smelter has been decommissioned and is not considered part of any future deal, paving the way to destruction.
