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Staff photo by John Rawlston/ The GE Power plant, on Riverfront Parkway in downtown Chattanooga that formerly belonged to Alstom, is slated to shut down manufacturing operations at the end of 2016.For about three decades, Phil Chaffin worked at the sprawling Chattanooga waterfront manufacturing site GE Power plans to shut down at the end of this year.
“I was really surprised when GE announced it would close,” he said about the Riverfront Parkway operation the company bought from Alstom in late 2015. “Alstom had put all this capital in this facility. We need industry here. That’s what makes the world turn.”
When the plant closes, it will end more than a century of manufacturing by predecessor companies dating back to the late 1880s in Chattanooga. But it’s not the only so-called legacy business that struggled in 2016 as some of the region’s biggest employers are closing or cutting back.
The GE plant is shedding 235 manufacturing jobs and will have just a remnant of about 50 non-manufacturing people working in Chattanooga when all the cuts are done, according to the company. Known as Combustion Engineering for many years, the company employed nearly 6,000 people in the early 1980s making fossil-fuel and nuclear steam generating equipment.