How hard is it to knock a building down?
A derelict building in Texas has become a viral sensation after surviving an explosion and several blows from a wrecking ball, earning it the nickname “the Leaning Tower of Dallas.”
The 11-storey structure has been teetering on the edge of collapse since demolition crews tried to bring it down with explosives on Feb. 16. The demolition successfully brought down the entire outer frame of the building, but the centre stack and elevator shaft remained.
That’s the moment when the old Affiliate Computer Services building was destroyed, and the Leaning Tower of Dallas was born.
Dallas residents have been snapping tongue-in-cheek photos of the structure ever since, comparing it to Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa and pretending to hold it up from afar. The nearby Choctaw Casino even projected an advertisement on the side of it to get some free publicity.
Local station WFAA has set up a livestream to watch for the tower’s eventual collapse, but it’s unclear when that will happen.
Demolition crews tried to knock the tower down with a wrecking ball on Monday, Feb. 24, but that only added to the Leaning Tower’s infamy.
Observers suggested that the wrecking ball was laughably small and completely incapable of bringing down the huge structure.
“I’ve seen 4-year-olds hit pinatas harder than this,” Twitter user Danny McDonald wrote. “Sad!”
“The Leaning Tower of Dallas just checked in ‘safe’ on Facebook,” another user added.
A third critic mocked the tower through an old Texas cliché.
“Everything is bigger in Texas,” he wrote. “Except wrecking balls, apparently.”
“Use a bigger ball,” one man wrote on a sign he held up near the site.
The Lloyd D. Nabors Demolition team announced on Monday that it was starting a “multi-step process that is both safe and effective” to bring the tower down, the New York Times reports. Its plan is to chip away at the top of the tower until it’s low enough for a large excavator to finish the job.
“This may take several days, or weeks, and only the building will determine how many days it will take to safely complete the project,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday — after the widely mocked wrecking ball attempt.
Lloyd D. Nabors Demolition also defended the size of the wrecking ball, saying the 5,600-pound (2,540-kilogram) ball is the maximum rated size for the crane it’s using. It says the ball itself is approximately 3.5 feet (roughly one metre) tall.
That’s roughly the size of the one in Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball video, as some have pointed out.
No exact date has been set for the Leaning Tower’s final bow — but don’t you ever say they just walked away.
Maybe they should let Miley Cyrus come in to finish the job.