Four Years Since Somerset’s Brayton Point Towers Imploded

Ten years after they began to take shape on Mount Hope Bay, Somerset's Brayton Point Power Station's twin 500-foot cooling towers came tumbling down in a dusty mess of concrete and steel.

Can you believe it has been four years since the towers imploded?

Construction of the towers began in 2009, at a cost of about $620 million following years of litigation to force the Brayton Point Power Station to stop dumping heated water into Mount Hope Bay.

The coal-fired Brayton Point Power Station, the last coal-fired plant in Massachusetts, had been burning coal to generate electricity since 1963. The plant closed in 2017.

In April 2019, three smokestacks on the Brayton Point property were demolished. Later that month, the towers came down.

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The property is being redeveloped to support renewable energy projects. President Joe Biden visited the property in 2022 to tout its reuse.

The Brayton Point cooling towers were visible for miles around and from as far away as the international space station.

A number of protests occurred at the plant to try and force its closure, including one in 2003 in which several protestors were arrested.

Explosive charges in the base of each tower brought them down on April 27, 2019. The towers collapsed in a matter of seconds.

I watched the towers implode from the west-facing deck of Fall River Government Center as a guest of Mayor Jasiel Correia. After watching their construction daily from my office in Somerset, it was surreal to see them come down – and so quickly.