Stadium to go out with a bang

Web posted July 30, 1997

Associated Press

ATLANTA (AP) - The former home of the Atlanta Braves will go out with a big bang Saturday, when 1,600 pounds of explosives will be used to bring Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium to the ground.

It's the second Atlanta landmark to bite the dust in a week. The Omni, home of the Atlanta Hawks, was leveled last weekend to make way for a new basketball and hockey arena.

The stadium implosion will begin about 8 a.m. Saturday and will take only 27 seconds, said Steve Pettigrew, president of Franklin, Tenn.-based Demolition Dynamics Inc. The plan is for the stadium's support columns to collapse onto each other like dominoes, he said Tuesday.

``It'll look kind of like a giant wave ... just like at a baseball game,'' Pettigrew said.

The only interruption in the plans could come from the weather.

``If there's a thunderstorm, we'll evacuate the area and wait for it to blow over,'' Pettigrew said.

The Braves moved across the street this year to play in their new stadium, Turner Field, formerly Atlanta's Olympic stadium. The site of the old stadium will become a parking lot for Turner Field.

The inside of the old stadium looked like a bombed-out city Tuesday, with rubble, wires and pipes piled everywhere. The seats where thousands of fans cheered the Braves for 31 years were gone. Signs touting Coca-Cola and Kodak still hung from the walls.

Long yellow and orange wires dangled from holes bored into the 240 columns that support the stadium's white-and-gray circular decks. Crews began installing explosives inside the columns last week.

Pettigrew said police and private security guards are guarding the old stadium around the clock, even though the explosives are not live. Fifty demolition experts will come in to hook up the explosives shortly before the implosion, he said.

``The explosives are set to explode inward, so there should be very little flying debris,'' said project manager Louis Mosley.

Even so, a buffer zone will be set up around the stadium an hour before the implosion, Mosley said. Streets within a quarter-mile radius will be closed at 7 a.m.

The Omni implosion last week was a more delicate operation because the arena was sandwiched between CNN Center and a transit station, with several concrete parking garages and the Georgia Dome nearby.

The old stadium doesn't adjoin any other structures, so ``there is room for error - unanticipated and unexpected error,'' Mosley said.