Fire drill finale sends off Expo Center

Expo Center’s new owners, Key Development Corp., bought the property from the Port of Hood River in mid-March. The company plans to take down the old, abandoned Expo Building to make way for two smaller light industrial buildings abutting Portway Avenue — tenants still unknown. The rubble footprint will likely become a parking lot.

Claudia von Flotow, Key Development project manager, said salvage crews have already cleared out most of the usable material from the building’s interior, such as the old black doors, aluminum frames and metal pieces.

“They were able to get more than we expected,” von Flotow said. The reusable materials totaled “tens of thousands of dollars” in value — all pieces that won’t need to be scrapped and buried in a landfill.

Workers were disassembling panes of glass at the west entrance and loading them onto a small truck Friday morning.

Next week, crews will take apart the cooling system and discern if that’s reusable. Then, either Thursday or Friday, the building will be fenced off from public access and Crestline Construction will start knocking down walls, if all goes according to plan.

The port had long considered selling the 30,000-square-foot Expo Building (formerly a Clark Door factory) due to high maintenance costs and subpar profits from hosting events. Since 2013, the goal has been getting it knocked down to make way for smaller buildings.

Most recently, the Expo Center served as extra warehouse space for waterfront tenants such as Solstice Wood Fire Café. Now all the boxes are cleared and the building’s insides are mostly gutted. Several stray pipes and bundles of insulation were lying on the floor this week.

The Expo Building has also been popular with local fire departments hosting large-scale drills due to the building’s height and ample vacant space.

Hood River County fire departments held their last drill there Wednesday, just a week before heavy demolition work begins.

About 65-70 people took part. Skill training sessions were diverse, including blind building entries and navigation, a start-to-finish response scenario with engine hose lines, ladder climbing, and scaling the roof by riding a bucket on Hood River Fire’s Tower 3.

Hood River Fire Captain Dave Smith said firefighters got the go-ahead to do virtually whatever damage they wanted to on the building.

“It was really nice to have a building like that — that’s going to be taken down — to practice in. We don’t have to be too careful,” Smith said.

Aesthetics weren’t an issue. In a “breaching” exercise, fire students axed away at the west exterior wall of the building from inside, on a raised platform area. The goal, Smith said, was to cut a ventilation hole.

The agencies didn’t set any real fires during the drill. Curious waterfront visitors saw smoke billowing from the Expo Building’s north entrance, but the real source was smoke machines, which filled the entire structure when staffers cranked them up to full power.

Lt. Scott Tenant, event coordinator, called the drill a “great success.” New recruits got a chance to learn vital skills from 30-plus year veterans, Tenant said.

All county departments participated, and several firefighters from Mosier joined in the event.