After seeing the first Charlie’s Angels movie, a friend of ours gave the following capsule review: “They should have had fewer fights and blown more stuff up.” Readers with similar tastes will love implosionworld.com , a Web site that covers the demolition industry with news articles, reminiscences, and a profusion of video and still photographs of projects past and present from around the world (most of which, strictly speaking, are not really implosions, as the site concedes).
Visitors will find a section on records (largest, tallest, longest, most structures at once) as well as step-by-step reports of jobs like the demolition of Space Launch Complex 41 at the Kennedy Space Center. Some items have an element of wistfulness, like the taking down of an 1886 bridge in Kansas City or of other similarly historic structures (…Ben Franklin Worked Here!” says one jaunty account). Others have a mildly goofy tone, like the spindly Canadian radio tower that had to be knocked down after it was accidentally hit by an airplane. Yet, as can be seen from the ingenious planning that was needed to make a Welsh smokestack hemmed in by buildings fall nearly vertically, when it comes to demolition, the least visually impressive projects can often be the toughest.
