Wednesday, December 16, 2009

"P" is for PLENTY

This Week's Professional Development: Controlled Demolitions Operations


The Trojan Cooling Tower Demolition:





Imagine 25,500 tons of concrete, walls 20' thick . . . 2,400 tons of 2" thick steel rebar . . .



Sellafield (formerly known as Windscale) nuclear processing and former electricity generating site, on the coast of the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England:



Calder Hall was the world's first commercial nuclear power station.



. . . 650 tons of explosives . . .



Gelsenkirchen, Germany:






. . . 620 tons of timber for shoring and tamping the explosives . . .


Blow up of the ARCELOR cooling tower in Luxembourg.
Note: the tower was supposed to fall in the other direction.





"10 seconds to demolish" is not counting the better part of two months it takes to place all those charges.


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1 comment:

  1. so first and foremost, i'm a little disappointed in the blast radius of some of these charges. p = plenty means an extra case of c4 per charge. or maybe thats just in combat ?? and i think on the last one, had they thrown a light kicker charge up a hundred feet on the back side and not done a complete ring around the base they could have directed the fall a lot better... but hey, thats just my professional opinion. what would i know about it?

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