At 9:58 last night, accompanied by a series of thunderous blasts, the Red Flag Home Xiongchu Store at the intersection of Xiongchu Avenue and Luoshi Road in Hongshan District was “brought down” by 600 kilograms of explosives in 7.1 seconds. This successful demolition set two records: it was Wuhan's first blast using high-precision, long-delay detonators; and the demolished building is the largest single-building structure ever successfully brought down in a single blast in China.

                                          The moment of the Red Flag Home Xiongchu Store demolition

                                                      Water spraying to suppress dust

       The Red Flag Home Xiongchu Store is a 7-story frame-structure building with a floor area of 45,000 square meters. The furniture megastore, which had been open for nine years, stood at the northwest corner of the Youli Interchange under construction.
       Standing on the roof of a 17-story residential building, one could see the towering plume of dust kicked up by the explosion, reaching as high as a 20-story building. The billowing dust drifted sideways across Luoshi Road to a residential area more than 100 meters away. Six water trucks and a timely light rain helped, and the dust was basically cleared in just 15 minutes. Xiongchu Avenue, right next to the blast site, was covered with scattered construction debris.
       A demolition expert from the Wuhan Municipal Construction Group said that because of the large volume of the Red Flag Home Xiongchu Store building and its proximity—only 9 meters—to the nearest building, a vertical blast had to be carried out with precise control. Using ordinary detonators to initiate the explosives would provide a delay of only 2,000 milliseconds with an error of 300 milliseconds, failing to meet the precision requirement. It was therefore decided to use high-precision, long-delay detonators with a delay of 3,400 milliseconds and an error of only 30 milliseconds.
       The Youli Interchange is the most critical node of the rapid-transformation project on the Second Ring Road between the Meijiashan Interchange and Chuping Road on Xiongchu Avenue. This four-level, butterfly-shaped interchange will have a total of six ramps, with their main structures all located on the north side of Xiongchu Avenue; three of the ramps need to pass through Red Flag Home and its vicinity. The success of this blast is highly beneficial to completing by the end of the year the main works of this roughly 6.9-kilometer trunk road known as “Wuchang's Second Avenue,” thereby achieving full connectivity of the Second Ring Road.
       The person in charge of the construction unit said that the large amount of construction waste generated by the blast will be cleared within 10 days, with little impact on traffic during that period.