June 8, 2006
Doerun -- WALB News Ten had nine cameras in the area to capture the tower demolition from various angles. One of those cameras was 2,500 feet above the ground in an airplane. From above, you can see the WFXL tower start to fall, then fold up into three pieces.
Seconds later, the WALB tower comes crashing down. Both towers fell around the two stations transmitter buildings. Amazingly, those buildings avoided major damage.
WFXL's tower is in three large pieces closest to the camera. The demolition experts hoped it would fall more across the roadway from the WALB tower. All that's left of our tower is crumpled metal to the right.
It clipped the back of WALB's building, damaging only a portion of the roof and air conditioners. And look at two big pieces of WFXL's tower that fell next to each other with a pine tree right in the middle.
The demolition crew set off 27 shaped charges. The WFXL tower was too unstable to send workers up it to place the charges on the structure. They actually put them on some of the guy wires, and adjust the tension on others.
They even blew the guy wire anchors. They hoped that would pull the tower down like a tree being chopped. But the guy wires from both towers criss-cross, and chunk of the falling tower hit the cables that were holding WALB's tower steady.
With no support, our 1,000-foot cable came falling straight down. Each tower weighed more than 100 tons. Now, those tons of steel and mangled cable litter the site where two towers stood since 1982.
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