The Three Stacks: An Industrial Monument Nobody Wants to Lose

Three concrete stacks rise from the shoreline at the south end of Morro Bay, each four hundred fifty feet tall, visible from miles up and down the coast. They have been part of the skyline here since the mid-nineteen fifties, when Pacific Gas and Electric began constructing what would become the Morro Bay Power Plant on a hundred-acre site beside the rock.

Units one and two came online in nineteen fifty-four, adding their first stack to the horizon. The remaining two stacks followed with units three and four in the early nineteen sixties. For the next several decades the plant burned fuel to generate electricity and discharged the byproducts, visible and invisible, into the air above the bay. The power it produced was real. So was the pollution.

Environmental regulations and shifting economics eventually made the plant unworkable. It was decommissioned in twenty fourteen. What remained were three enormous concrete structures with no remaining function, occupying a prominent position on the coastline of a town that had organized its visual identity around them for sixty years.

The stacks were proposed for demolition. Local residents repeatedly said no. The debate has continued for years, with different factions arguing about cost, about heritage, about what the skyline of Morro Bay should look like now that the thing the stacks represented is gone. An agreement reached in recent years sets a demolition deadline, though the city has contested it.

Communities do not usually mourn the loss of the infrastructure that polluted them. Morro Bay is doing something more complicated than mourning: it is arguing about what those stacks mean, now that they no longer do anything. That is a harder question than it appears.