Thanks to the handiwork of J.T.B. Services and Dykon, the l2-story Buccaneer Hotel, seawall landmark in the Gulf port city, was laid low.

Built in 1929 at a cost of a little more than $1 million dollars, the 12-story hotel was once a luxury venue for folks from Houston and Dallas. The Buccaneer had 440 guest rooms and could accommodate up to 1,000 guests. It had two decks facing the Gulf, sunbathing on its roof and a convention hall for 750 people. Ornately craved wood stair rails, columns, panels and beams graced the Buccaneer's stately halls.

Just four years after it opened, a fierce hurricane slammed into the Galveston area blowing out the windows in the Buccaneer, soaking carpets up to the tenth floor of the hotel. During the 1940s, the Army took over the hotel, using it as a resident for officers training nearby.

By 1961, the Buccaneer's days as a hotel were over. It became the Moody House, a retirement home for seniors citizens owned by the Methodist church. By the early 1990s, the leader of the church community began to agonize about the state of the old building. Thefr studies showed that restoring the building would cost twice as much as building a new facility. When the new Edgewater Retirement Community opened next door in 1998, it was time for the Buccaneer to go.

Teaming with fellow NADC member Dykon from Tulsa, JTB began the removal of all the interior walls on the first two floors of the building and cut the pipechases and stairwells on every other floor.  The exterior columns on the north side of the building were cabled back to the next row of interior columns on every other floor in order to pull the building away from the Edgewater Community structure next door.  In order to protect Seawall Blvd. in front of the hotel, laminated mats and five feet of sand were placed over the trolley- tracked street. The cooling towers and transformer were protected with steel I-beams and mats. A plywood wall was erected in front of the glass storefront on the adjacent building.

JTB arranged for another NADC member, Protec Documentation Services from Rancocas, NJ to record the shot. Protec was accompanied by a camera crew from the Discovery Channel who were developing a special to be aired this March focusing on pre-blast surveys, seismic monitoring and implosions.  All the asbestos was removed from the Buccaneer before JTB arrived on-site. JTB's sister company, JTB Environmental Services, removed an underground tank and some contaminated soil from beneath the basement slab.

Once the protective work was in place, Jim Redyke from Dykon and Jim T. Bulgier from JTB began the preparation of the building for implosion. They drilled over 400 holes for the nearly 250 lbs. of explosives used to bring the building down.  Holes were drilled in the first and second floors as well as in the top four floors. Fifteen delay fuses were used to set the explosion off.  The charges were timed so that they would detonate in sequence. The center charges went first, and when those columns fell, they pulled the outside columns inward and away from the adjacent structures.  This sudden loss of support and shift in weight causes the building to buckle and fall in on itself.

"It was 11:55 AM when we completed all our last minute preparations.  As I backed my truck away from the building to a safe location, the crowd began to cheer.  The farther I backed away from the building and towards the crowd, the louder they cheered.  As I got out of my truck and ran to a group of policemen, the cheering reached its peak.  As I raised my hand radio to my mouth, the crowd grew silent."

"I notified Jim T. Bulgier in our VIP area that we were ready and Jim started the countdown.  The police siren sounded a minute warning.  At ten seconds, Jim started the loudspeaker countdown."

"At five seconds, the loudspeaker was silenced, but the crowd had started their own countdown.  You could see everyone shouting, five, four, three, two, one.  Everybody cringed at the anticipated moment of the blast." "Nothing happened."  For two or three minutes, everyone wondered what was going on.  Finally, a police officer overheard something on his radio.  The detonator batteries had gone dead.  They were changed immediately.  We sounded the one minute siren again and the building promptly came down exactly 60 seconds later."

The implosion itself took just seven seconds.  JTB cleared Seawall Blvd, allowing traffic to commence within three hours after the blast, not the ten days that the city had planned for.  The site was cleared in a little over four weeks, using three large excavators, two rubber tired loaders, a skid steer loader, two operators, two burners and two laborers.