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| Tallest Building Demolitions in the World |
8. OCEAN TOWER Our first tower was located on South Padre Island in Texas, close to SpaceX's new Starship facility. It was 115 meters, or just over 375 feet, tall before it fell in 2009. The building was supposed to include luxury condominiums with a swimming pool, a gym, and even a spa room for residents to enjoy. But after two years of construction, the builders noticed that cracks were starting to form in the Ocean Tower’s support columns. It turned out that the base of the tower had sunk down by almost 16 inches. That's why the skyscraper officially earned the nickname, “The Leaning Tower of South Padre.” Although the construction team hoped that they could fix it, the damage was already done. After engineers analyzed the problem, they announced that the renovation work would be too expensive and uneconomical. In December of 2009, a company known as Controlled Demolition Inc. performed a controlled implosion of the building. At the time, the $75 million building was the largest concrete structure to ever be imploded. The park next to the Ocean Tower was closed for the day to ensure the safety of the residents of the island. Still, spectators were able to watch the skyscraper crumble in nearby hotels and restaurants.
7. LANDMARK TOWER Also in Texas was the Landmark Tower, a 380 foot, or about 116 meter, tall tower in Fort Worth. When the building first opened to the public in 1957, it was the highest skyscraper in the city. It also had the largest revolving digital clock in the world at the top of the building. The skyscraper was originally fully occupied, but after 30 years at the end of its lifetime, it was completely abandoned. Once it was hit by a tornado in March of 2000 and suffered significant damage, it was decided that the building should be demolished. In 2006, the Midwest Wrecking Company evacuated 15 blocks of the city to perform the implosion. With the help of just over 360 pounds of explosives, it took only a couple of minutes for the Landmark Tower to come tumbling down. The site was revisited in 2016 in order to build a new parking garage in the area.
6. AFE TOWER At 116 meters tall, or 382 feet, the building was the tallest tower to ever be demolished in Europe. The Afe Tower was a part of the campus of the Goethe University in Frankfurt in Germany. Initially, they wanted to dismantle it piece by piece, but after numerous complaints from residents about the lengthy process, the decision was made to demolish the building with explosives. Their new plans gained a lot of attention in the media and over 30,000 people watched the implosion live on-site in 2014. With a loud bang, the concrete skeleton around the building core was brought down first. A few seconds later, the building core was separated by two blasts on the 5th and 17th floors. One part fell to the south and the other part to the north. After the property stood vacant for a few years, to the regret of the Goethe University students a modern residential and hotel tower known as One Forty West was built. The new building has luxury apartments on the top floors and hotel rooms below them.
5. BUILDING IN XI’AN CITY In November of 2015, a 118 meter, or just over 387 feet, building known as the Golden Flower Building was demolished in Xi’an City, China. It was the tallest skyscraper to ever be demolished in the nation. The high-rise building was originally built in 1996 but had not been used for decades even though it was legally the property of Jinhua Pharmaceutical Factory. It seemed too expensive to try to remodel the tower, so China ultimately decided to hire the Pengcheng Explosion Company and get rid of it. The company started off by digging a 13-foot deep trench around the perimeter to reduce the impact of the explosion. With the help of 1.4 tons of dynamite and 12000 detonators, the building came crashing down into pieces. While the demolition was quick, cleaning up all of the 66-foot high piles of debris took over 70 days. Once the area was cleared, the construction of a new commercial complex immediately began with stores and residential spaces.
4. J.L. HUDSON’S DEPARTMENT STORE Built all the way back in 1911, the J.L. Hudson’s Department Store in Detroit, Michigan, had one of the wildest demolitions of all time. The building featured everything from retail stores to office space. When the 134 meter, or 440 feet, tall store first opened to the public, it was the tallest department store in the world. After over 80 years of operation, J.L. Hudson’s Department Store was demolished in 1998. 20,000 people watched the implosion. The blast was so strong that it broke the windows of retail stores nearby that had already been abandoned. It even accidentally damaged the Detroit People Mover, an elevated train in the city. Since then, the construction of a 912-foot, or 278 meters, tall skyscraper started in the area and will probably open in 2022.
3. BRAYTON POINT POWER STATION Although this next one is not technically a building, the demolition of the Brayton Point Power Station was epic. The coal power facility in Somerset, Massachusetts first opened in the 1960s and operated until May of 2017. Years after the plant closed, the company that owned the facility decided to demolish two of the plant’s cooling towers in 2019. The explosion set a world record for the tallest cooling towers to ever be blown up, with each building standing at 500 feet or about 152 meters. That makes these towers only a couple of feet taller than the cooling tower at the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, which was the first cooling tower to ever be demolished in 2006. People from all over New England traveled to the Brayton Point Power Station to see the demolition live. Over the next few months, the crew continued to demolish different parts of the power station. All the scrap metal created a series of fires days after these implosions, which added to the craziness of the demolitions.
2. MEENA PLAZA Construction of this tower was never completed, but the Meena Plaza still earned the title of the tallest building to be demolished. The plaza included four separate towers standing at 165 meters, or 541 feet, in the air. Developers first began building the Meena Plaza in 2007 but stopped just a few years later in 2012 due to a dispute with the owners. Although they planned to continue with construction in 2014, the building was left abandoned because of financing issues. In 2020, the government in the capital decided to demolish the buildings 2020. Not only was it considered to be an eyesore, but the demolition was part of a bigger plan to redevelop the port of Mina Zayed. The team in charge of demolishing the Meena Plaza wanted to make sure no one in the United Arab Emirates’s capital of Abu Dhabi would be harmed from the implosion. They analyzed the building and surrounding areas to have the safest demolition possible. By using 13,000 pounds of plastic explosives, the towers tumbled to the ground. Three of the buildings imploded first, but after 10 seconds, all four were turned into giant piles of rubble.
1. POWER STATION WESTERHOLT Meena Plaza was going to be our number one, but we didn’t want to withhold this final demolition from you. Standing at 337 meters, or 1105 feet, the chimney of the Power Station Westerholt was the tallest controlled structure to ever be demolished. There are a lot of mega tall chimney demolitions that are even taller than the previous 165-meter high Meena Plaza, but Westerholt was the highest. The chimney was built in 1981 in Germany. When the power station was decommissioned in 2005, the chimney met its unfortunate fate a year later. The structure was blown up at two different levels, with one explosion towards the bottom and one in the middle. So many spectators showed up to record the blast and take pictures that it actually delayed the team from being able to demolish the building on time. Soon, the chimney was nothing more than a giant mound of debris.
