Willow Island Disaster

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Willow Island disaster was the collapse of a cooling tower under construction at a power station at Willow Island, West Virginia, on Thursday April 27th 1978. The falling concrete caused the scaffolding to collapse. 51 construction workers were killed. It is thought to be the largest construction accident in American history. During the 1970's many coal powered power plants were being built in the valley along the Ohio River. The Allegheny Power System was building another larger plant at Willow island, West Virginia. The new plant would have 2 generators with a total capacity of 1300 megawatts. This was in addition to the 2 smaller units that were already there. By April 1978 one natural draft cooling tower had been built, and a second was under construction. One of the contractors, New jersey based Research-Cottrell was well known for constructing such towers around the country.

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