In just 20 seconds on Sept. 9, one of the largest buildings on campus imploded and collapsed to the ground, leaving behind nothing but a large pile of concrete debris.
The College demolished the nine-story Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital building, located on Maynard Street near Dick's House, to make way for a new parking lot and lawn.
Assistant Facilities Planning Director Reed Bergwall said the parking lot will be completed by January and landscaping will begin in April. He said the project will cost about $1 million.
The building has been empty since 1991, when the hospital moved to the newly constructed Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon.
The hospital's demolition, managed by the Bianchi-Trison Corp. from Syracuse, N.Y., cost about $1.5 million, according to Bergwall.
At about 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 9, a series of charges set off 476 pounds of dynamite, disintegrating the hospital's support columns, said Jim Parisella, demolition superintendent for Bianchi-Trison. The building fell "on its own," Parisella said in a telephone interview from Syracuse.
"We really don't blow anything up," he said.
Jim Santero, project manager for the company contracted by Bianchi-Trison to help with the demolition, said the building's main support columns were drilled with two to four holes where they intersected the first, third and fifth floors, and the basement.
Bianchi-Trison personnel cleared those floors of all non-supporting walls and physical objects, drilled 594 holes into the columns and filled them with 476 pounds of a gelatin-based dynamite, Santero said.
Parisella said the columns were then wrapped with chain-link fence and a heavy fabric as a precaution against projectiles from the explosion.
Using a non-electric initiation system, a demolition expert detonated explosive charges in 20 steps, Santero said.
Bergwall said planning for the implosion started a year ago, when the College decided renovating the old hospital would not be cost efficient.
Salvaging crews began removing valuable wiring, piping and reusable metal in January and the demolition contractors started preparing the hospital for implosion in July.
Bergwall said the concrete, masonry and brick debris from the implosion will be used to level the ground where the building used to stand.
"We're recycling the building," Parisella said. He said more than 14,000 man-hours went into planning and conducting the implosion.
