'Intense day': Jet Demolition's Brinkmann after demolition of twin towers

Noida, Aug 29

It was an "intense day" for the team of engineers who were overseeing the demolition of the Supertech twin towers in Noida but heaved a sigh of relief after everything went according to plan and both the 32-storey Apex and the 29-storey Ceyanne turned to a heap of debris in just nine seconds.

Applauding the efforts of the entire team, Jet Demolition's Joe Brinkmann said India and Mumbai-based Edifice Engineering have now joined the 100-metre club of countries that have buildings over that height demolished, and that too with residential buildings standing so close, making the project extremely challenging.

"All credit goes to the entire team," he said.

"Thank you lord" was his first reaction after the plan was executed neatly, he said.

"It was an intense day. Emotions were high. There was a lot of mental and physical effort," he added.

Brinkman said the "waterfall implosion" technique was applied for the demolition of towers as lots of residential buildings were also constructed close to the spot.

Chetan Dutta, who pressed the button to bring down the buildings, said: "The atmosphere was quite calm and every one of us was reassuring each other that everything will go well." But, he admitted that he had stopped speaking ahead of the blast.

There were 20 monitoring systems, including black boxes, placed by the CBRI, Edifice and IIT Chennai to study various aspects of the demolition. The report will will be used for research purposes besides seeing what can be improved in the next demolition project.

At the press conference, Utkarsh Mehta of Edifice Engineering said "it was not an easy task to demolish the twin towers".

"Some overseas firms that were called in for the project had conducted a survey. However, we had worked with Jet Demolition in the past too. Hence, the co-ordination was much better," he said.

"The result shows the hardwork and research that we had put in," Mehta added.