Sugar factory comes down after 100-year history.
Onlookers may have been disappointed that the blast wasn’t spectacular. But for the Dykon crew behind the implosion of Colorado’s Great Western Sugar factory, everything went according to plan.
The company expressed concerns that the massive cast iron columns could shatter and cause public safety issues. Officials with Recycled Materials Company, Inc., which oversaw the project, and Dykon Explosive Demolition Corp., the company hired to bring the building down, said on Friday that the outside walls of the building might remain intact after the implosion.
They wanted to make sure the support beams of the building didn’t become shrapnel to security officers, company employees or spectators who lined the viewing areas with lawn chairs, blankets and cameras.
Dave Alexander, the general superintendent on the project for Recycled Materials, said cast-iron doesn’t react in explosions like steel, it can cause a lot of damage. For that reason, they wanted to contain the implosion as much as possible, so they only wired the ground floor beams. They loosened the bolts on the beams of the two upper floors, so they would collapse when the lower floor came down — internally.
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