Leaning Tower of Fail

At 8AM this morning, two controlled explosions were detonated with the intention of bringing down two large boiler stacks at the old FMC Steam Plant in South Charleston, West Virginia. I arrived with my family around 7:30, camera in hand to find a small crowd had already gathered. The media was present as well. After all, it's newsworthy when things are blown up within city limits.



You can see a few on-lookers patiently waiting for the sirens that warn of the imminent blast. You can see their safety is assured by blast fences near the bases of the stacks, though only one of them is visible from this location.



So with baited breath, we await the initial blast. And when it came, you could see it, hear it, and most impressively feel it. The paper reported 40lbs of explosives. Which, as a former combat engineer with an awful lot of experience blowing things up, is a fairly small shot. But impressive nonetheless.



And then things start to fall. It was pretty neat. Here's a whole series of photos for your viewing pleasure.

















That was pretty neat! It all happened in a space of a few seconds. Except... um... hey, wasn't that one supposed to fall down too?



WHOOOOOOOOOOOPS!

After the dust clears... you can see a nice little pile of rubble and structural damage to the tower's base. But.... I'm thinking there should be more. See. I was a combat engineer. I've blown a lot of stuff up. And we had a mantra for calculating how much explosive we needed to use for a shot. This mantra was, "when in doubt, use more."



I immediately knew... EPIC FAIL. So, I was chuckling as all the viewers kind of stood there staring at the monolithic tower waiting for something else cool to happen. Like, maybe more explosives or maybe a strong gust of wind. Or maybe even one of the engineers to walk over in his hard-hat, purse up his lips, and give it a final poof and blow it on over. I verbalize this. "Epic. Fail."

The guy beside me in the crowd goes "huh?"

"Buddy, right now, lawyers are being called. Insurance companies are scrambling. Engineers are swearing. Epic. Fail." And I very briefly explain to him my background working with demolitions.

"You mean that's it?"

"Yup. Now we have six months of structural analysis and engineering to figure out how to deal with this. In the meantime, they've got a very dangerous situation with that tower. They won't be able to let anyone in or out of that area until they square this away."

"Ahahahah." And off he goes to relay my revelations to his family.

If you look closely at this image (sorry it's a little out of focus) you can see a green blob in the lower left corner. That's an engineer who actually walked up to the base of the Leaning Tower of Fail for a look-see. What cracked me up, was that he was dutifully wearing his hard-hat. As if that would protect him from several hundred tons of concrete if that thing dropped on his noggin.




So, my parting image, is that of the Leaning Tower of Fail with Union Carbide's building #82 providing a reference on the right side of the frame. Using that as a reference, you can see how the tower is slightly leaning off to the west. Whooooooops.



UPDATE!

The Leaning Tower of Fail has fallen! I saw it go down on the news. I guess they pushed it on over with a Dozer or something. The footage of it dropping didn't include an earth shattering kaboom (a~la Marvin Martian) so that's the assumption. Either a dozer did it, or someone went over and huffed and puffed.