Early this morning, the three towers of the Didcot power station in the UK were pulled down in a controlled explosion.
The cooling towers were voted Britain’s third-ugliest building by readers of Country Life magazine—but were also local landmarks in Oxfordshire, both as as a reference point and as a source of jobs for many people in the station’s heyday. The coal-fired station stopped running in March 2013, and all 36,000 tonnes (40,000 tons) of the 375 ft-tall (114m) towers were brought down at around 5am local time with the help of 180 kg (397 lb) of explosives. The power station lasted 44 years and was gone in less than 10 seconds.
The closure was a result of regulations that force fossil-fuel-powered plants like Didcot to either install equipment to reduce emissions or run as normal but reduce the lifespan of the station, which is what the plant’s German owner chose to do.