What could be cooler than a compilation of nuclear cooling towers undergoing demolition? Those towers imploding with surprised faces drawn on them! It’s an ad from Ecotricity, a wind-power advocacy group. -via Geekosystem

On October 26th, explosives opened the Condit Dam in Washington State to allow the free flow of the White Salmon River after 98 years. The reservoir took about two hours to drain, shown here in time-lapse. Read about the dam dismantling project at National Geographic. Link -via the Presurfer

What goes up must eventually come down, but tall brick and mortar chimneys and cooling towers must come down carefully. During controlled demolitions, people come from all over to get photographs at a safe distance, like this awesome photo montage of the chimney demolition at Henninger Brewery in Frankfurt, Germany in 2006. See the rest of this collection of pictures with stories at Chimney Liner Pro. Link -Thanks, Johny!

(Image credit: Wikipedia user Heptagon)

A 275-foot smokestack was demolished and fell the wrong wrong way today in Springfield, Ohio. The tower brought down power lines and crushed equipment. There were no injuries, but 8,000 people were left without power. Link -via Metafilter

Built just as the Cold War came to its end, the K Cooling Tower at Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a nuclear processing plant, was never much in demand.  Finally this week the enormous structure crashed to the ground in a remarkable controlled implosion. What goes up, must come down!

This was the second largest cooling tower to be consigned to oblivion by controlled destruction in the world, ever. The pictures do only little justice to the huge size of K Cooling Tower – it was 450 feet tall and 345 wide. As such it posed what you might call an exceptional challenge to the SRS managers. As such many experts were also called in to advise on the obliteration of the tower.

With video! Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

We don’t usually post about pranks and means things like that on Neatorama, but this one is just too cute to pass. Here’s Becky prank calling a local demolition company in Dublin, asking them to demolish her school (with her teachers in it because they give her extra homework on Friday!). Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

More prank calls here: 10 Telephone Pranks That Make You Squirm – Thanks David!

A building demolition in Liuzhou, China went horribly wrong on Wednesday. Experts planned for the building to be split in two, but they expected both halves to fall down. Instead, one half of the 22-story apartment building was left leaning at a dangerous angle. It has since been brought down by crane. Link -via Arbroath

Peter Y. Hong of the Los Angeles Times has more:

The Victorville demolition is one of the most dramatic ends to a bad bet made during the housing boom, but abandoned developments have become an all-too-common sight in California. Nearly 250 residential developments totaling 9,389 homes have been halted across the state, according to one research firm.

The developer of the Victorville project had hoped to sell the houses for more than $300,000 as they were being built last year, Forrester said. But reality quickly diverged from that vision. Home prices have tanked faster in San Bernardino County than any other Southern California county during the downturn. In March, the median home sale price for the county was $160,000, down 43% in a year, according to the San Diego-based research firm MDA DataQuick.

Officials of Guaranty Bank of Austin, Texas, which took over the development last year, were unavailable for comment. But Victorville city spokeswoman Yvonne Hester said the bank decided not to throw good money after bad.

"It just didn’t pencil out for them," she said. "They’d have to spend a lot of money to turn around and sell the houses. They just made a financial decision to just demolish them."

Link (Photo: Christina House / LA Times)