By Jennifer Bell
NORTHWEST HOUSTON - Smoke and dust filled the air as two buildings at Lone Star College-University Park were imploded Sunday morning, making way for the site to be used as green space.
The buildings pulsed a few times, implosive devices going off like shots inside of them, before falling to the ground.
The college purchased the buildings last year from Hewlett-Packard for $12.6 million, intending for them to be parking garages, LSC System Executive Communications Director Jed T. Young said. The current price to build a garage in today’s market is around $12 million, Young said, so instead of letting the buildings sit in a “mothball state” until it was more cost-effective to build a garage, the college decided on demolition.
“It just wasn’t something Lone Star College could use right now,” Young said. “We’d be paying $1.25 million just to keep it up every year.”
The parking garage and land purchased with it encompass 21 acres, Young said, and when the garage is built, there will be 1,200 parking spaces.
NCM Demolition & Remediation LP and Controlled Demolition Inc. worked together to implode the buildings, a decision that was based on the height of the buildings and their proximity to homes, contractors said.
“This building was just too tall and robust to take it apart piece by piece,” Bill Rose, NCM’s vice president of industrial services, said. “A crane and ball or explosive demolition would have been too noisy.”
Rose said that he and other contractors talked to nearby Lakewood Forest residents, some of which live 200 feet behind the building. Imploding the building was a good choice, he said, to make sure residents weren’t exposed or harmed by the debris.
“This went exactly as we had planned, the building broke up very well,” Rose said.
In the fliers passed around to nearby homes, contractors stated that dust would linger in the area for about four to six minutes. For Young, minutes are nothing compared to the 15-20 weeks a wrecking ball takes to tear down a building.
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