How do you make a building dance down the street? Or walk sideways?

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp;jsessionid=HBLFACPBPFPH?id=ns24571


How do you make a building dance down the street? Or walk sideways? It's the kind of control that only a master of blasting and demolition like Mark Loizeaux could pull off. He's head of Controlled Demolition Incorporated, the company known to everyone with something difficult to demolish. Since his father Jack set up the company, the family has brought down or blown up 7000 structures ranging from bridges to weapons, everywhere from the US to Argentina via Iraq. Liz Else talked to him within earshot of the rest of the family at CDI's headquarters deep in the peaceful countryside north of Baltimore

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o how do you make these doomed structures dance or walk?

The secret lies in preparation - which involves many things, including learning from the last blast. So we'll drop a building and people will go to the closest bar, or go have a party, but my brother and I are out there checking out the debris, seeing how far it went, what the fragmentation is like, did it meet our expectations, what might we do differently next time. If it is a new type of construction we will have 15 different cameras on it from every imaginable angle so we can study it, you know, image by image, to see if it corresponded to the demolition plan.

Planned to the last millisecond?

Completely planned. It has to be the right job in the first place, the right explosive, the right pattern of laying the charges, and sometimes, which sounds odd, the right repairs to bring it down as we want, so no one or no other structure is harmed. And by differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make it dance. We've taken it and moved it, then dropped it or moved it, twisted it and moved it down further - and then stopped it and moved it again. We've dropped structures 15 storeys, stopped them and then laid them sideways. We'll have structures start facing north and end up going to the north-west to avoid hitting something.

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Were you involved with the 9/11 clean-up?

Our crews worked with one of the main contractors after 9/11, to pull the shards of skin of the building from the south tower of the World Trade Center, out of this 15 storey gash in the side of the Deutsche Bank building. So we are very familiar with the building, with the damages sustained, with the environment. We can speak about the community situation. And given that we often will go to a place like Seattle, where we had to communicate with an international community living around there, in four or five languages before felling the Kingdome arena, we have rather interesting community outreach experience and capabilities. We're patient. We understand people's emotions and the gamut they can run.

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(the rest of the article tells what he thought and did on 9/11, what other work they have done - they worked for Bechtel......

much info to think about. including how this interview was arranged, etc.)