Strung Out on Blast

Dynamite: the big red-paper-wrapped sticks lying in their box ominous and yet exhilarating, fuel for fantasies of some ultimate Fourth of July, giant firecrackers packed with brown paste that looks like plastic wood--is plastic wood, but the binder that holds the sawdust is nitroglycerin. Wicked, lethal stuff, the weapon of choice of skyjackers and left-of-far-left radicals and terrorists and underworld hit men; but today two clean-cut, fresh-faced young guys in white hard hats, Mark and Doug Loizeaux, are handling it. They pull sticks out of the box and slash them with a razor blade and prime them with blasting caps, fine orange and yellow wires running out the end, and load them in holes drilled into concrete columns that support Kansas City's moribund State Hotel. And after they've loaded the dynamite, my God, they ram it into place with a sawed-off hoe handle, as if it were so much packing, and then ram some stemming turf on top to plug the hole and move on. The owners of the hotel put a contract out on it. Tomorrow morning, Sunday, Mark and Doug and their dad, Jack Loizeaux, are going to blow the place up.

They make a formidable team, though none of them looks the part of beefy demolition. Jack, 57, is slim and handsome, with trim gray hair and a small mustache; Mark, compact, poised, self-assured as someone must be who took over the business temporarily at the age of 19, when his dad broke his back in a car accident; Doug, tall and bearded, the younger son but already dropping buildings and bridges on his own. The Loizeauxs are a family outfit, and even Freddie Loizeaux, wife and mother, former head of the Maryland P. T. A., is a licensed blaster and travels with her husband to handle public relations with officials nervous at the thought of what will happen to them if the explosives break loose.

The box of dynamite sits in a pile of plaster rubble in what used to be the lobby of the hotel next to a battered blue Samsonite suitcase full of time-delay blasting caps and the Loizeaux boys move systematically from one column to the next, loading the holes spaced evenly around each column. Each hole gets the smallest possible charge of dynamite, a pound or a pound and a half; one of the qualities that have made the Loizeauxs the best demolition men in the world is their fanaticism about using the least possible amount of explosives to get the job done. They'd take down the Empire State Building with Black Cats and ladyfingers if they could figure out a way to do it, but as it is they've brought down 22-story buildings with no more than a couple of hundred pounds of dynamite--which is why, in 18 years of work, Controlled Demolition Inc., the family firm, has never had an accident or an injury. Occasionally, very occasionally, a building won't fall on the first shot, a consequence of the Loizeauxs' refusing to overload it with explosives, and then Jack has to go in and set more charges and try again. But such undercalculations have become increasingly rare as Controlled Demolition has refined its techniques. The days when it had to go to Lloyd's of London for insurance are now far behind it.

The State Hotel isn't anything special to look at, ten stories of brick, the decayed repository of tens of thousands of Kansas City weekends and Kansas City weeks, but its physical roots go back to the 19th Century, hand-laid masonry columns down in the basement six feet square supporting a welter of columns upstairs, some of them structural steel, some of them poured concrete embedded with heavy reinforcing rods, some of them poured concrete wrapped with bands of steel like giant springs, an array right out of Rube Goldberg, every support different from the last one and every support requiring its own unique arrangement of explosives if it's to be turned, as the Loizeauxs intend turning it, into instant gravel. The concrete and masonry supports get dynamite charges. The structural-steel H beams running ten stories up the front of the hotel inside its brick facing get something special from the technology of the space age: linear shaped charges. When the stages of the Saturn 5 separated from one another in all those moon shots, linear shaped charges wrapped around the inside of the rocket's skin separated them. A linear shaped charge is an explosive device that looks like a segment of a copper picture frame, an extruded V-shaped copper tube filled with plastic explosive. When the explosive goes off, it turns to a gas and expands at 27,000 feet per second, which is fast enough to generate pressures of 3,000,000 pounds per square inch. The shape of the copper tube forms the expanding gas into a jet and the jet makes a cut as thin as a sheet of paper along the line where the charge is attached, an instantaneous cut cleaner than the work of an acetylene torch straight through three inches of structural steel.

But if the hotel is nothing much to look at, in another sense it's very special indeed, because its east side, ten stories high, rises only the width of an alley, 12 feet, away from a 22-story hotel next door, a hotel still in service and filled with weekend guests. The Loizeauxs have taken down larger buildings than the State, but they've never before taken down one so tight. The least mistake and they're likely to tear up the neighboring hotel and destroy their perfect record and bring on monumental lawsuits and maybe kill somebody, and don't think they don't know it. Jack Loizeaux is a praying man who nevertheless believes the Lord helps those who help themselves, but this weekend he's praying whenever he can find the time. He's already handled three other jobs in Kansas City, a smokestack and an old packing house and a hotel, but a few months before the State job another outfit tried to take down a building a block away and botched it. They blew it up three times before the last of it fell and they broke half the windows in the central city. Jack has to sell the city fathers all over again on the virtues of explosive demolition, and the only way he knows how to do that is to put his own reputation on the line by taking on the worst job in town. The State is the worst job in the country, and if he's not actually sweating, he's certainly checking and rechecking the building and his plans, and so are his two sons, and the night before the blast he will find himself wide awake at three in the morning with diagrams and delay patterns dancing before his eyes.

Loizeaux first handled explosives back in 1938, when he was a junior at the University of Georgia in Athens. He owned a bicycle then, and an Airedale, and a cabin in the woods. He was a forestry student. The Oconee River was washing out the forestry-department nursery and the school decided to straighten the channel to bypass the nursery area. Jack worked the surveying transit and then helped the DuPont engineer load dynamite into the holes the students drilled. "When it came time to shoot," says Loizeaux, "he said, 'How would you like to shoot it?' Wow. I was just a kid. I pressed that plunger and we threw hundreds of thousands of tons of loam and mud and it just went skyward and when it was all over and the mud settled, the old lazy river came straight as an arrow for about 200 yards. It just fascinated me. The tremendous power that was at my finger tips. I couldn't sleep for a week." He remembers an earlier experience with explosives that may have impressed him even more: He remembers his father blasting holes in his orchard where fruit trees would be planted. Then the father had power; now the power was his.

But Loizeaux didn't go directly from college into demolition. World War Two intervened, and after the war, the memory of tremendous power perhaps quiescent, he started a tree service out of Towson, Maryland, specializing in big contracts from cities, 20,000 trees at a time. Those were the years when the American elm died off in the East from Dutch elm disease. Loizeaux had all the work he could handle, and to get the job done he innovated. "When we had dead elms and dead sycamores, we'd cut them off low and drill holes and blast and split them and then we'd take a Navy winch truck and pull out the pieces, so we had no disposal problem." Thus began his practical experience with explosives. And notice: Felling a tree means figuring out how to put it exactly where you want it, using ropes and gravity to lay it in the slot, a skill that Loizeaux would later turn to good account.

Builders, hearing about a tree specialist around Baltimore who used explosives, would come over and ask Loizeaux if he'd take on a stubborn rock or a recalcitrant footing and for 100 bucks or so he'd do it. He began to like the money he was earning from those extra jobs and he began to learn about blasting. He hung around DuPont, studied engineering at night school, read his way through the blasting library, took chemists and engineers to lunch. The specialists at DuPont came to think of him as an expert, and one day they had a problem that matched his talents. "DuPont called me and said a colonel at Aberdeen Proving Ground thought he'd be cute and there were three smokestacks to come down and he shot one and he's broken windows for many miles, so he's in hot water. So I went out there. He'd taken three cases--50-pound cases, 150 pounds of explosives--and he'd had his men scaffold the stack and his engineers had lowered the cases into the stack at different elevations. Well"--this from Loizeaux deadpan--"he blew it. So I went out there with six pounds of explosives for each stack and I dumped the other two."

Loizeaux has a film showing the most outstanding of his many shots over the years, and prominent among its scenes are the ballets he and his sons perform with smokestacks. Loizeaux knows where to drop them, like trees. He leans them east, west, north, south and points between. Or he telescopes them into themselves so that they disappear before your eyes, leaving behind as they fall, suspended in the air, a ghostly column of soot. The colonel at Aberdeen can only have been chagrined. But for Loizeaux, a chimney was just another kind of tree.

In the early Fifties, Loizeaux shot nothing but stacks. Then he was called to Chile to blast out a deepwater port, one of the few foreign assignments he has accepted, not wanting to spread himself too thin, and when that job was done he was in business. He's been blowing stacks, bridges and buildings ever since, until today he has as much business as he can handle, and he's brought in his two sons, both licensed blasters and competent demolition experts in their own right, to help him keep up with demand.

Like many other self-made men, Loizeaux has looked hard for something beyond himself that might explain his (continued on page 196)Strung out on Blast(continued from page 142) success, and the search has made him an amateur mystic, in his case a Christian who usually manages to testify to his faith whenever he speaks in public, testimony that can have remarkable results at college graduations and in chamber-of-commerce halls, coming as it does from a man whose power over inert matter fascinates and awes most people who meet him. Loizeaux, whose chosen work is reducing the American past to pieces of rubble conveniently sized for loading into dump trucks, has made more than one audience weep for its lost innocence. Ask him how he does what he does and he will say that "one who knows the Lord has an advantage over others, or should have. I just say Lord, take care, take charge." He also does his homework, however.

The Loizeauxs serve as explosives consultants to wreckers. When the Vince Bahm Wrecking Company of Topeka got the contract for the State Hotel, Bahm called in Controlled Demolition, and Jack went to Kansas City and figured out what Bahm would have to do to get the building ready. Following Loizeaux's plan, Bahm weakened the masonry columns with a jackhammer, knocked out part of a load-bearing brick wall in the back of the hotel with a wrecking ball, cleared out the partitions in the basement and on the first floor and partly cut some of the structural-steel beams. He would do as much for any demolition, but then he went on to add the special Loizeaux touch. He ran seven-eighth-inch steel cable from the columns in the front of the building to the columns in the back and then pulled them as tight as their 50,000 or 60,000 pounds of tensile strength would allow. Several floors above the first were cabled together, ready to pull the walls inward when their supports were cut. Rest beams, their points of rest severed, thus became cantilever beams, pulled over like trees. Bahm also drilled the holes that would hold the dynamite that the Loizeaux boys would later load.

Eighty-five percent of a building, Loizeaux says, is empty space, air. The rest, the shell, is steel and cement and brick and plaster and wood. Those materials were raised into the air against the pull of gravity, and sitting there now, they retain as potential all the energy that went into their raising. Loizeaux puts small, selectively placed charges in the basement of a building, and having cabled the building together upstairs, times them to go off in a pattern and lets gravity do the work. The energy of the building's raising, released when the supports are kicked out, also brings it down, an elegant economy. Having tremendous power at his finger tips, Loizeaux uses as little of it as he possibly can. Seismographs placed in nearby buildings show less disturbance than when a bus goes by.

Knowing dynamites--densities, velocities, dynamites that shatter, dynamites that gently heave--is part of Loizeaux's secret, but his delay patterns are the key to his extraordinary ability to put a building wherever the wrecker wants it. Knock out the supports on one side before you knock out the supports on the other and you tip the building over in the direction of the earlier explosions. Cable a building together, knock out first the middle and then one end and then the other and the building will fold up like the flaps on an ice-cream carton. It sounds easy. It isn't. Loizeaux also has to consider how fast each part of the building will fall. End A has to fall a certain distance before end B can fall on top of it. Falling objects, unhindered, travel at 32 feet per second, but falling sections of multistory buildings are hindered by walls and floors and lag behind. Loizeaux must also take that delay into account. He learned by doing. There's no book on the subject, though someday he may write one. In the meantime, he's passed his arcane skills on to his sons. They grew up in the business. Every big job the Joizeauxs have done in the past 18 years has been filmed; they study the films as carefully as the coaches of the N. F. L. study the films of their past games, and they've saved the diagrams of delay patterns as well, cataloged them by type, and with every job they take them out for review.

Mark, who is 25, put the Loizeaux skills to good use in 1972 on a project heavy with unintentional ironies. Back in the mid-Fifties, at the height of its efforts to solve the problem of housing the nation's poor, the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) built a $36,000,000 high-rise housing project in St. Louis called Pruitt-Igoe. Architect Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center in New York, designed Pruitt-Igoe, 33 11-story high-rises that at one time housed 12,000 people--not in comfort and security, as HUD intended, but in violence and squalor. Fighting costs, Yamasaki designed elevators that stopped only at every third floor; residents then walked down galleries and stairs to their apartments. Yamasaki envisioned the galleries as places where children could play, but they became, instead, places where muggers and junkies and drunks could skulk, no man's lands. Population densities in Pruitt-Igoe were far too high for either comfort or safety. And because most of the residents were on welfare and could pay little or no rent, the project went so deeply into debt that it began draining funds from the entire St. Louis public-housing program, blocking any development of alternatives. Finally, in desperation, the housing authority decided Pruitt-Igoe needed surgery and proposed to demolish some of the high-rises and scale the others down to manageable size. That was where Controlled Demolition came in. Mark's job was to peel off one wing of a building and leave an adjoining wing intact. It was a demonstration project to prove what the Loizeauxs have been proving for nearly two decades, that explosives do the job faster and safer than jackhammers and wrecking balls. But there was symbolism, too, in the assignment: Radicals had been blowing up Government buildings in the name of a new and better world; at Pruitt-Igoe, a member of a conservative family from Maryland was blowing up a Government building that had become an embarrassment to the liberals of America. The building came down without a hitch, and rumor has it that the residents of Pruitt-Igoe cheered. So did Mark Loizeaux: with relief that it had fallen where it was supposed to.

• • •

Sunday morning in Kansas City, unseasonably cool, the air crisp, the sky blue, a west wind having blown the smog away. Across the street from the State Hotel at the Muehlebach, downtown Kansas City's finest, the manager greeted guests at an Implosion Party he was sponsoring. The Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, meeting that weekend in reunion, were just waking up. Notices in the elevators had warned them of the demolition so that none would be jolted out of bed imagining the Japs had descended again from the western sky.

I went early, my two young children in tow, a lifelong pyromaniac eager to see the benevolent destruction. Whatever our recent pacifism in the United States of America, who among us doesn't like explosives? At the boys' home where I grew up, on the Fourth of July we would finish our chores and eat supper and wait impatiently for near darkness to troop up to the superintendent's house on the hill. There, milling in the back yard, we would gleefully fire off a crateful of fireworks, taking out our hostilities on the thickening blue air. Once someone accidentally or deliberately dropped a Roman candle and all 40 of us danced the Independence jig while flashing colored balls of fire rocketed through the grass. If my children are any measure, the next generation of Americans will be just as gone on fireworks as we; last summer they took out a stump behind the house with nothing more than Black Cats and persistence, little Loizeauxs at practice. Like a giant piece of punk it smuldered for two weeks, turning slowly to fine gray ash and leaving a hole where its root system had been, deep into the ground.

The first floor of the State Hotel was boarded up when we arrived, halves of old steam boilers wired around the columns to contain any debris from the shaped charges attached there. Tons of sand hauled in from the Kansas River bottom covered the sidewalks, protecting gas mains and electrical vaults beneath. The glass windows of the Muehlebach's first-floor offices were protected by two semis parked in the street. Wires from the dozens of charges loaded inside the hotel snaked out to a cable and the cable ran southwest across the intersection of 12th and Baltimore to a green park where a crowd had gathered to watch. Jim Redyke, one of Controlled Demolition's new men and soon to become its Western representative, connected the cable to a box the size of a storage battery that contained six flashlight cells and a condenser and two buttons, one red, one green. Both buttons would have to be pushed at once to trigger the charges. Doug Loizeaux was up on a nearby building with a Canon Scoopic 16 set to record the blast and it was ten to eight in the morning and the entire project was waiting for enough light. Vince Bahm had piled bales of straw against the wall of the hotel across the alley from the State and now sat on a high-loader ready to clean up the streets. Jack Loizeaux roamed near the building, worrying.

Police cars blocked off the streets around the hotel and a traffic-control officer parked alongside the green ordered the crowd back. The light came up and Doug called in to Redyke that he was ready. The last few stragglers moved off the street into the crowd and the police pulled back their cars and then only one man stood next to the building, Jack Loizeaux, with his radio in his hand. The siren on the traffic-control car whooped once and stopped and then a minute passed and it whooped twice and stopped and then in the silence Loizeaux's voice crackled over Redyke's radio, Thirty seconds and counting, and silence and then, Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, into the countdown now just like a moon shot and the police loud-speaker picked it up and boomed it out to the crowd, nine, eight, seven, six, five--Loizeaux running away from the building now toward the detonator, still counting--four, three, two, one, fire!, and Redyke mashed the two buttons with the heels of his hands and instantly the shaped charges went off, muffled sharp raps of sonic boom as the jets cut the H beams at 27,000 feet per second--boom, boom, boom--and then the dynamite delays went off in sequence--four, five, six, seven, eight, nine--and the sound merged into one rolling roar and the building began to come apart as if every brick had been pried loose from its neighbor, light and space showing between bricks and stone window frames and keystones and facings, the center of the wall falling first and then the west end and then, as a cloud of dust rolled up from the foundation like a tsunami surf, the east end fell away from the alley and the rubble disappeared in the dust.

The dust rolled toward the green and enveloped the cheering crowd and Loizeaux disappeared in the direction of the rubble and it was five minutes before the dust cleared to reveal a pile of bricks and twisted beams and shattered blocks of concrete less than one story high where before a ten-story hotel had been, and when it saw that pile, the crowd was awed again into silence, the latent image of the solid hotel, built in 1923 and a fixture of the corner for 50 years, a memory out of childhood, still imprinted on everyone's eyes.

One steel beam had broken free of the building and fallen the wrong way; leaning across the street, it had nicked a cement-block screen in front of the Muehlebach and whomped one of the semis, folding it up like a bent beer can. But the State Hotel had fallen into its own foundation and the hotel across the alley was untouched, only its lowest fire escape slightly twisted. Loizeaux was already kicking himself about the beam that fell across the street, vowing to cable higher up next time. Vince Bahm was wheeling the high-loader through the streets around the rubble, pushing it into the foundation, and the sweeping machines were hosing clown the streets to wash away the thick layer of dust that now covered streets and crowd alike. And then the crowd rushed off to hotels and coffee shops to put the world back together with drink and food.

The Loizeauxs went, too, and Doug and Mark talked about their work. Their father is obsessive about safety and so are they, but for once they mentioned the other side of demolition, the side that draws the unwanted crowds, the secret kick of concentrating all your skill and hope and reputation, too, on one shot of juice traveling through a wire. Mark: "It's all worth it, because when that thing's down you look up there and you say, oh, man, we did that. It's like winning the Grand Prix or bagging your elephant."

Doug: "The feeling of success. It's definitely a rush. Strung out on blast."