Dundee tower blocks demolished
The skyline of the Scottish city of Dundee was changed forever at the weekend, when demolition contractors brought down a number of decaying high-rise flats in a series of controlled explosions.
The four towers of the Alexander Street multis were brought crashing to the ground on the weekend, drawing crowds of thousands of spectators - including many former residents - and causing shockwaves that could be felt for miles around.
The blocks, which defined the city's skyline for 43 years, had stood at 21-storeys tall and once homed over 600 families. Local demolition contractors used thousands of detonators placed strategically around the buildings to blow up the towers.
The explosives engineer in charge of the project, William Sinclair, said everything went by the book and it was a model demolition.
"The demolition was perfect, absolutely perfect," he said. "When you're demolishing four buildings in a city centre you obviously have to be very thorough and very precise and the team did that. In total, we used 135kg of explosives and that was the absolute minimum needed to bring them down. We also used 4,500 detonators in the operation and the result was just about as good as it gets."
