COAL COUNTRY - The weekend weather forecast trumped man's plans for a record-breaking concrete pour that was to have started Friday and ended today at the Minnkota Power Cooperative plant near Center.

The project's status will be reevaluated Tuesday and may be rescheduled for next weekend, pending the long-range forecast.

Minnkota plans a continuous 6,600-cubic-yard pour for an 11-foot thick concrete foundation for a new, 550-feet-high pollution control and emission stack. When it happens, the pour will beat out the previous record pour for the Trump Tower foundation in Chicago and exceed by twice a continuous pour at nearby Leland Olds Station at Stanton for a similar project.

Minnkota engineers and others decided Thursday afternoon that the risk of a rain downpour in the middle of a concrete pour was not in the best interest of the project, said Minnkota's project engineer Kevin Thomas.

"Once you start, you can't quit," Thomas said. He said the risk of a compromised foundation was greater than the costs associated with a sudden change of plans.

Additional workers from job contractor Maertens-Brenny Construction, plus the concrete crew from Knife River Corp., were either at or headed toward the plant site when the job was postponed, Thomas said.

"It's not something we took lightly," he said.

He said Minnkota is confident the job still will be done this fall, possibly starting as soon as Friday.

The continuous pour will run at least 30 or more hours and take a convoy of 35 concrete trucks, each arriving from batch plants and departing within minutes.

The foundation will cure over the winter and the actual emission stack will be built next summer, so at least this delay shouldn't cause problems on the other end of the timeline, Thomas said.

He said Minnkota had hoped to finish the pour before it shuts down Unit 1 for a routine fall maintenance outage next weekend, mainly to avoid the congestion of workers and activity at the plant.

Minnkota will spend about $300 million on the pollution control project to clean up most of the sulfur dioxide and other pollutants from its older Unit 1, built before pollution control equipment was required.

Other plants around Coal Country - Leland Olds and Great River Energy's Stanton Station - also are undergoing major retrofits to meet new air quality standards to reduce regional haze by 2013.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 1-888-303-5511, or lauren@westriv.com.)