Threaten to blow up the Parliament buildings and the media comes running to watch you thrown in jail.
Threaten to blow up four sisters in Lakeview and the media comes running to ... record the historic event for posterity.
MOnday at around 7:30 a.m., Murray Demolition, working on behalf of Ontario Power Generation (OPG), plans to blast the huge stacks known as the Four Sisters at the Lakeview Generating Station, into oblivion.
“I ’ve had calls from every media outlet from Kingston to Kapuskasing,” said John Earl this morning. Earl is the communications officer at OPG who will be herding the media and the public into Roy McMillan Park at the foot of Hampton Crescent early Monday to get photographs of the stacks’ demise.
If there are high winds, the event will be postponed because OPG doesn’t want dust blowing over the surrounding neighbourhood.
Of course, a cynic would suggest that those who live in the area wouldn’t mind one final dust bath after all of the black gunk they scraped off their cars and houses for so many years.
Based on the number of calls received by The News and other papers in our chain, there’s more interest in recording this event than there is in Shiloh Nouvel, super-spawn of Brangelina.
This morning, I even took a call from Andy McLellan, who grew up in Mississauga and now lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas.
In a voice that definitely had a southern drawl in it that has more to do with Lubbock than Lakeview, McLellan, 38, asked about the time of the event, which he plans to record along with half the population of the GTA.
Since he works for an airline, it’s no problem for the Gordon Graydon resident to get back to his hometown. He found about it through a friend and then checked out The News’ web site.
“Everywhere I’ve lived in the city, I have always seen the stacks,” said McLellan. “It’s kind of nostalgic. I remember when the people came up from the U.S. to protest, in the 1980s I think it was, and climbed up on the sides of the smokestacks.”
He was referring to a protest by Greenpeace activists who were drawing attention to the pollution the plant was emitting and unfurled a gigantic sign after rapelling up the structure.
McLellan realizes that people might find it a might strange that he would come such a long way to see something that will be over in just a few seconds.
“The stacks are something that have always been there for me,” he explains. “It’s kind of blowing up a part of your past.”