One year ago

In grey and miserable conditions much like yesterday and today, this happened:

You may recall that then mayor, Dan Plato, pressed the button a little early and most people missed the big event.

One year on, nothing has been done to the Athlone Power Station site, but it’s amazing to see how normal the cooling tower-free view has become and how little the iconic structures are missed. Except of course by my kids, who remind us each and every time we drive along the N2 that that’s where they used to be.
(The cooling towers, not the kids.)

A few of my photos from that day.

Video from Philip Gibb

Damn! Missed!

As did virtually everyone else. That’s what happens when Dan Plato gets a touch of Premature Eradication and implodes the cooling towers 4 minutes early.

Fortunately, there are a great many videos and pictures of the event around, like these from Times Live and Life Quest, for example.

Everyone at my “secret” location (Public Parking at Groote Schuur Hospital – population about 40) was taken by surprise and hugely disappointed. Alex was also very sad and so later in the afternoon, I took him to Ground Zero and we looked at where the towers once were. This in itself proved to be a tourist mecca and we had to fight through the traffic and the crowds to get a look.

And it struck me that Cape Town now has some iconic chimneys which are quite spectacular in their own right having been rather well hidden before.

More photos from a bit of a disappointing day are on flickr.

UPDATE: Best video I’ve seen of the big event:

Goodbye! :/

Soon

The implosion of “Athlone’s Two Old Ladies” as the Cape Times described them recently (thus terrifying half the elderly population of that suburb) will take place at noon on Sunday. These “Two Old Ladies” in question are the cooling towers at the now defunct Athlone Power Station which are in a poor state of repair and need to come down before they fall down.
Although looking at the cold front forecast to come through on Saturday, they might have left it a bit late.

The Athlone cooling towers sit right next to the N2 and are a Cape Town landmark which will be sorely missed. In these respects, they are almost completely undissimilar to the Tinsley Cooling Towers in Sheffield, which were next to the M1 and were a Sheffield landmark which is sorely missed (by some people, at least).
Those towers came down in a dramatic nighttime demolition process in August 2008 (at 3am on the 24th, to be exact – almost 2 years to the day before Cape Town’s tribute act)  and which was more than ably captured by flickr user Julia Parsons (aka wsogmm) and gives us some indication of what we might expect to see on Sunday.

At first, the towers are standing up (that’s them on the left there).

Then they fall down.

So that’s: Standing up. Falling down. Up. Down. Got it?
It’s not rocket science. In fact there are no rockets involved at all. Which is a shame.

The next big question is – where are you going to watch the towers come down from? Based on the fact that the population of Cape Town is approximately 3.5 million, and about 100% of those people want to watch, it’s my guess that the the main vantage sites are going to be rather busy.
Thankfully, the big man upstairs (cough) was thoughtful enough to provide a ready made grandstand for the spectacle in the form of Table Mountain. Regrettably, he failed to consider the provision of adequate parking or indeed decent weather for the occasion – albeit that the demolition guys will be delighted with the light rain forecast for Sunday.

Me? I have my own little idea on a secret location from which to observe this defining moment in the history of Athlone’s skyline, but if you think I’m sharing that little idea with you before the big day, you can think again.

UPDATE: Incoming from my Dad – the video…

which confirms the standing up – falling down routine in real time motion picture goodness.

UPDATE 2: WIN R1,000 just by taking a photo.