The demolition of the stadium was supposed to begin early Sunday morning with a series of explosions designed to bring it down. Curious onlookers and the media gathered with their cameras at the ready. The demolition crew detonated their charges, but the stadium refused to come down.
Watch below:
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Engineers say it’ll fall – eventually.
Kevin Lindke, the guy in charge of the implosion for SCM Engineering, said all the blasts went off as planned.
“All the explosives fired on every single beam. The building just squatted and it just hung up. So what’s going to happen is at some point in time gravity is going to take over,” said Lindke. “One of these sections is going to go, and it’s going to rip everything with it, and everything is going to come down.”
If it doesn’t come down soon, Lindke said they could come back and pull it down with cables, or try another set of explosions.
The Silverdome opened in 1975, and was home to the Detroit Lions until 2001, and the Pistons from 1978-1988. It also hosted MHSAA football state finals from 1978 to 2004.
The stadium was closed in 2006, and in 2009, auctioned off to Canadian real estate developer Andreas Apostolopoulos, CEO of Toronto-based Triple Properties Inc. for $550,000. Triple Properties reopened the stadium in 2010.
But it closed again in 2013, after a winter storm destroyed the famous silver Teflon roof. The stadium’s contents were auctioned off in 2014.
