150-Foot Smokestack Dynamited

Buhl’s towering landmark and source of jobs fell gracefully from the sky, but the blast resounded through the community.

The 69-year-old smokestack of the now-demolished Pet-brand milk plant toppled slowly Friday from the force of 33 pounds of TNT at its base to the dismay or amusement of several hundred onlookers.

“It was our livelihood,” Doris Lyon said, gesturing to the old Pet plant where her husband worked for 26 years.

The explosion would give the change in their lives a note of finality, she said.

Clear Springs Foods purchased the old Pet manufacturing complex and the former B&M Oven Baked Bean plant from Pillsbury Co. in September.

Clear Springs, a Buhl-based rainbow trout producer, is remodeling the baked-bean plant to manufacture a new line of fish products.

But the old milk plant, built in 1927, was no longer functional for any other food processing.

Superior Blasting of Nampa dynamited the 150-foot smokestack, said demolition project manager Rob Hegstrom of JUB Engineers Inc.