Corey and I went to Berlin to watch the stacks fall today, but bad weather, confusion, and some dud explosives conspired to leave me with no usable pictures of the event.

We arrived early and lined up a perfect view of two out of three towers that were to be felled, but as the explosions started it became clear that I was mistaken about which smokestacks were being destroyed, and instead we had a really good view the one stack that was supposed to be left standing at the end of the day. And the other tower we had a great view of didn’t fall as was expected.

So, without any pictures of my own, I searched Beyond Brown Paper for images of the old Burgess Mill before it was dismantled, and of those smokestacks that so dominated the city’s skyline. See it in 1952, 1950, and 1914

KDPaine & Partners has a nice post (copied here?) and pictures. It turns out the problem with the third stack wasn’t dud explosives, but the heavy duty rebar reinforcement it was built with. As the demolition crew tried to cut it as a last ditch effort, the stack came down on power lines and caused some injuries.

berlin, new hampshire, burgess mill, smokestacks, implosion, explosion, demolition

SanDisk is playing this as the coolest thing that ever happened. Some photographer planted a couple cameras to photo the demolition of a bridge over the Mississippi, the explosion was bigger than he expected, he lost one of the cameras, but the CF card survived in working order. MobileMag has the story. SanDisk has a press release. And every blog in the western world is echoing it.

The photographer is Don Frazier, a staff photographer for the Southeast Missourian newspaper. From the SanDisk press release:

Built in 1928, the bridge crosses the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau, connecting Missouri and Illinois. With a new structure opening a few months ago next to the old span, the Missouri Department of Transportation earlier this month launched the first of four demolitions — the second is this Thursday, Aug. 26 — to raze the bridge. Crews rigged a section on the Illinois side with 600 pounds of dynamite, according to news accounts, intending to cause an implosion that would drop, rather than shatter, the bridge.

With permission from the highway department, “Frazier [...] found a spot just 240 feet away from the first concrete pier, where he set up the three cameras, each with different lenses, on tripods.” Frazier then hid behind heavy construction equipment 600 feet away and triggered the cameras by remote.

[context]:
Demolitions like this one used to be grand public events, but injuries and deaths to by-standers have caused most demo contractors to shun the publicity and do it privately. Fires and explosions of all types seem to draw gawkers, but fireworks factory explosions seem to be both the most dramatic and deadly.