But not Joe Brikmann. “It’s a beautiful feat of engineering. Just pack your bags and enjoy the day,” says the director of Jet Demolition, the man who made the design for the collapse of the twin towers and will press the switch at 2.30pm this Sunday that will trigger the – mortifying or exciting, depending on where you live – spectacle.
Brinkmann, an industry veteran with a 30-year career in blasting and explosives, is the ‘master blaster’ for the twin towers and admits the Noida assignment is among the toughest he has handled, primarily because Apex and Ceyane stand within a crowd of residential buildings half or one-third their size.
He cites the example of Meena Plaza, one and a half times taller than the twin towers (168.5 metres), which was brought down in Abu Dhabi in 2020. “That was a piece of cake compared to this one as there was no other building in the vicinity,” says Brinkmann.
But the explosives expert is “very confident” about his design and says no harm will come to buildings immediately adjacent to the Supertech twin towers in Emerald Court and ATS Greens Village. “Our main concerns are to make sure everyone is out of the exclusion zone on the day of the blast and nobody gets hurt, and the buildings are imploded without damaging property,” says the 62-year-old, whose first blasting assignment was to bring down a water tower at a South African coal mine in 1991.
“The buildings in this area (Noida) are in a high seismic zone (zone IV) and built to experience earthquakes, which are much stronger than vibrations from an implosion. We are very confident that the implosion of the twin towers will not cause any damage to properties. The impact will be a third of what a typical earthquake here would be,” Brinkmann adds. The Supreme Court-ordered demolition of the towers has become the most challenging exercise to raze a building the country has seen. Six months of preparation have gone into readying the towers for the final implosion with a blast design whose minimum requirement is pinpoint precision since the nearest building (Aster-2) is just nine metres from Apex. There’s no margin for error.
For Jet, the company he founded, the twin towers (Apex, 103 metres and Ceyane, 94 metres) will be the second tallest buildings it will bring down after the Bank of Lisbon tower (108 feet) in Johannesburg in 2019. That, too, was a complex assignment with buildings adjacent and across the street in the South African city’s central business district.
At the twin towers, the challenge hasn’t just come from the location but also their strength, which meant packing in much more explosives than usual. “It’s been a major exercise,” says Brikmann. “We are using at least twice as much explosives here as compared to a typical building elsewhere. These buildings (Apex and Ceyane) were originally planned for 40 storeys, but Supertech could only build up to 32. And being in seismic zone IV, the buildings are very strong. So, they have big columns and lots of steel reinforcement bars that make our job of implosion difficult. We are required to do more blasting than usual, and we must blast them harder to ensure that they break,” he adds.
This is the same team that had demolished three Maradu apartment buildings in Kochi two years ago. But this has been an altogether different challenge for Brinkmann and his seven-member crew, the latter staying in Noida for the past six months in two flats at Emerald Court.
“With the Supreme Court monitoring the work, everyone was cautious as well as concerned. It added a lot of pressure. The Supreme Court was monitoring the Kochi demolition as well, but it didn’t have the same involvement. Working in Noida has been a different experience. In Kochi, there was the court’s order and that’s about it. Here, we had regular meetings, while various matters were being dealt with on the sides. This did not happen in Kochi,” Brinkmann says.
For all the precision design, though, one aspect not in the blasters’ control is dust. “It is inevitable when something like this happens,” says the Jet director. “There is no practical technique for containing dust at the source. The dust is composed mostly of calcium, which is a basic plant nutrient. It’s not harmful to the environment and it will be dispersed by the wind. Most big particles will settle around the site and fine particles will drift a bit and then settle down.”
But the eleventh-hour retrofitting of basements at other Emerald Court buildings is not something Brinkmann is happy about. “The repairs should have been done a long time ago. The buildings were not built well in the first place, which is wrong,” he says. The retrofitting eventually began on residents’ insistence after they got a structural study done on their own that underlined the need for immediate strengthening of pillars before the demolition.
Brinkmann started Jet in 1994. Wife Liz joined him at the company in 1996. She handles finances, administration and HR. “We’ve had our shares of fights and arguments, but most of them have been positive. Our business is stressful. But if you don’t have stress and fear, then you are a fool. It pushes you to think and dream and helps you deal with issues the best way you can,” says Brinkmann, who moved to South Africa from the US in the 80s.
After studying mining engineering, Brinkmann did his masters in explosives and blasting and then went on to research the subject for six years. Today, he considers experience his biggest asset. “You can’t go to an institution and study demolition. Demolition management courses have been started in recent years, but technical aspects are not taught anywhere. It comes from experience. It is not a mainstream academic area. There are risks involved,” he says.
And rewards aplenty when it’s a subject one is passionate about. The science and intricacy of explosives and drawing up blast designs for demolition projects fascinates Brinkmann. “It’s my mistress after my wife,” he quips.