The end

As planned, they dynamited the Xcel High Bridge plant smokestack in St. Paul on Saturday morning (previous thoughts on this here). News Cut readers are sending images and video. Use this form to send images.

You know how I am by now, right? I like to turn the camera around and photograph the people photographing and watching. So if you’ve got one of those, feel free to send those along too.

Nathan Levine of St. Paul gets the award for being the first to send an image:

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And Mark Jungmann, one of my colleagues, followed seconds behind with the first video:

It fell gracefully, almost beautifully. And in Mark’s video above, the little puff of smoke coming out of the stack just before it crashed seemed its way of saying, “so long.” That’s the way I prefer to look at it, anyway.

Teresa Boardman of St. Paul Real Estate blog fame, has sent a series…

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“Oh The dust! People ran,” Teresa says.

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“The earth trembled…”

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.. and now they’ve got a mess to clean up.

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From a different vantage point, Luke Albrecht says, “The shockwave was amazing from just across Shepard Road.”

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Tracy Anderson of St. Paul took a series of images. Click on the image to see them in all of their implosive glory.

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I’m getting some e-mailed links to posted video.

  • David Zuhn of St. Paul from the Smith Avenue High Bridge.
  • Todd Pittman with the view from Lilydale.
  • Noah Kunin’s two cameras. “During the second “take” there’s some interesting audience reaction in audio and in the foreground. High fives, someone woefully misjudging the size of the stack, etc.,” he says.