Bite by bite, the prehistoric-looking excavator demolished the old cooling tower. It's an image that took me back to childhood playing with toy dinosaurs as they rampaged through the buildings I'd made with wooden blocks until everything was leveled. Many of us watched with childhood glee as the building was eaten away.
Sometimes particle physics labs get a bit old and creaky around the edges. A cooling tower at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory had been around since the 1960s and needed replacing. But taking out such a large building with so many vital connections to the rest of the lab is tricky. After more than a year of planning, the facilities and safety people embarked on removing a decades-old fixture of the SLAC skyline.
Enjoy the show!
The video was made by Brad Plummer and Rod Reape at SLAC, and you can read more about the cooling tower demolition. Brad set up a high-end digital SLR, taking photos every 30 seconds, on the roof of a nearby building. Rod took video from ground level, and they combined the photos and footage into the time-lapse.
