It seemed to come out of nowhere.
Last week, there was nothing unusual about the patch of land where Wellington Street North meets the waterfront.
Then, almost overnight, a giant, pearlescent bubble suddenly popped up on the skyline.
Residents began calling The Spectator asking about the mysterious dome. Is it a soccer field? An industrial storage facility? Some sort of spaceship?
Turns out the dome is the first of two high-tech grain storage units being built by Parrish & Heimbecker, a Canadian agribusiness firm.
“It really does make a striking change to the landscape,” said Ian Hamilton, vice-president of the Hamilton Port Authority. “It looks neat.”
The dome, which is about nine storeys high and about the width of a football field in diameter, was inflated over the weekend. It’s currently made of fabric infused with plastic, but the final product will be concrete. Crews have already begun spraying concrete on the inside of the bubble.
The second bubble will be inflated at the end of April, and the two domes will be ready to store grain by early August.
Each dome can handle 28,000 tonnes of grain and the pair is expected to handle more than one million tonnes in the next decade, Hamilton said.
Parrish & Heimbecker signed a long-term lease with the port authority in August last year for 380,000 square feet of land on Pier 10. The company is spending more than $30 million on this project.
By the numbers
Diameter: 58 metres
Height: 27 metres
