Vegas Casino Frontier Hotel | Building Demolition | BlowDown | Free Documentary

Las Vegas Casino Demolition: Blowdown is an explosive four-part building demolition series profiling some of the most challenging projects of Controlled Demolition Inc. of Phoenix, Maryland. Each of the structures, some notable, others notorious, is unique and presents the team with challenges ranging from the structural to the explosive and to the bureaucratic.

In this episode the team from CDI descends on Las Vegas to take
down the Frontier Hotel and Casino landmark using 5000 sticks of
dynamite.

A vintage Vegas structure, the Frontier was the second hotel to be
built on the strip and hosted notable performers like Elvis, the
Supremes and Seigfried and Roy. Recently purchased for 1.2 billion
dollars, the hotel is being imploded to make way for a reconstruction
of New York's Plaza Hotel. But unlike most demolitions, in most cities,
anything that happens in Vegas is part of a larger spectacle, so not
only is the demo team contending with taking down the building, but
in working around more than 1,600 kg of fireworks and pyrotechnics
which will be used in the pre-demo show.

Despite its diminutive stature, the team expects to use in excess of
1,000 kg of dynamite, more than the team used to bring down the 32
story Stardust hotel earlier in the year. The team is challenged by a
lack of accurate blueprints and the concentration of rebar that
threatens the operation.

As they drill the holes to load the dynamite massive amounts of re-bar are found, preventing proper placement of dynamite and to add
further complication, they come across toxic asbestos within the hotel walls. So with only days to go before the implosion, CDI rethinks the demo plan and attacks the structure by pre-weakening it. Heavy-duty drills and skid-steers equipped with jack-hammers cut the support walls.
They plan an innovative technique using cables to ensure that the
building will fall in the direction they want it to. The cables are
wrapped around an end of the structure and attached to the elevator shaft inside the hotel. The plan is to pull the wall away from the neighbouring roadway and into the fall zone.

The implosion is set for 2:30 am, and the fireworks technicians will
warm up the Vegas crowd for the grand finale turning the historical
Frontier into a pile of rubble.