Georgia Dome gets demolished (Video)

All jokes about the Falcons’ Super Bowl collapse aside, the Georgia Dome was imploded Monday morning.

The Atlanta Falcons moved into a new stadium this season, as Mercedes-Benz Stadium took the place of the Georgia Dome. As the host of two Super Bowls, a long run of SEC Championship Games and the Peach Bowl, the facility also hosted some events during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

But the old usually has to be done away with to make room for the new, in the name of progress and modernization. The new stadium is also close to the Georgia Dome in can be measured in feet not yards or miles, so it makes sense to take the old building down now.

On Monday morning, the Georgia Dome officially became no more. Nearly 5,000 pounds of explosives were used to implode it. Any lingering jokes about the Falcons blowing a 28-3 lead in the last Super Bowl are appropriate again, one last time.

But the implosion/demolition did not quite go all the way to completion without a hitch. According to Tim Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, two large sections of the Georgia Dome’s exterior walls are still standing. The remaining sections will be taken down mechanically, presumably as soon as possible as a holiday approaches and a short work week for most people starts.

Rick Cuppelitti, executive vice president of the demolition contractor Adamo Group, suggested the job to take down the rest of the walls could be relatively easy.

“We have to investigate whether the charges [in those sections] went off,” he said. “If the charges went off, it’s not going to take much at all [to knock the walls down].”

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So we can shed a tear for the Georgia Dome, or not. But it’s now a pile of rubble, and a historical footnote for football fans.