I can see them dismantling the antenna sections at the top, in the reverse order to which they assembled them, but what will they do with the concrete structure, which goes up to at least 447 metres? I suspect that they couldn’t implode it because it’s too tall and doesn’t have enough interior volume.
So will they just nibble away at it with jackhammers? Or by then will we have directed construction-nanobots or something that will simply and gracefully turn it to sand from the top down?
Has anyone ever demolished a similar structure before?
I believe you’re right about not imploding it. It appears that they don’t implode towers – they just knock them over by setting a big enough explosion off at the base. But even so, the “tallest manmade structure ever felled with explosives” was demolished was only 1202’ (366 m), and it was a pretty wimpy radio tower.
Within a 500-m radius of the base, in all directions, lie two sports stadiums, a museum, three major hotels, the main railway station and its tracks, the convention centre, the computer centre of the Royal Bank (unless it got moved to the RB’s new headquarters in Meadowvale), condos, the main state-owned television studios, Roy Thompson Hall, and the Entertainment District, and the skyscrapers of the Financial District.
Unless the surroundings have changed dramatically by demolition time, and afford a kilometre-long (at least), and I don’t know how wide, clear space for the toppling Tower to fall into, we won’t simply be snapping it off at the base.
I once saw pictures of a large building which couldn’t be collapsed being torn down. The “nibble away at it with jackhammers” method best describes it. The building was enclosed in a large sheet of some canvas like material with chutes attached to the structure. The building was slowly torn apart with the debris being siphoned down the chutes to the base for removal.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Sunspace *
**…someday.
How?
**/QUOTE]
The easiest solution, of course, is to never knock it down. It’s gonna stand there for five hundred years.
If you absolutely, positively had to knock it over, having it drop to the south would be your best bet. There’s mostly just road and park in that direction. You can’t knock it over to the west because the Skydome is there, and it can’t go to the east because then you’d crush a bunch of stores and buildings, and the north is Wellington St. and all those office buildings and shops.
RickJay has the right idea–it’s going to stand there for a few hundred years (three hundred in the version I heard, RickJay, but I won’t quibble), and since it’s only about 25 years into its life, it’s not something we need to worry about right now.
But I imagine that if it had to come down, you’d be right, Sunspace: unbolt or cut the metal antenna off, then chip away at the concrete with jackhammers. The reinforcing rods would have to be cut away also, and it would take a long time, but eventually it would come down.
Of course, a lot can change in a few hundred years. Perhaps by the time the Tower is due to be demoloshed, technology will bring us to the point where structures are demolished like in the Warner Bros. cartoon that introduced us to Michigan J. Frog–a ray gun will simply erase them. But it is doubtful that a singing and dancing frog will be released from the Tower when that happens.
