Power plant implosion: Florida Blasts Away Old Power Plant

Power plant implosion. Oil plant demolition in Port Everglades part of a nationwide trend to decommission inefficient, costly, and polluting facilities.

Anyone who happened to be scanning the skyline in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 6:45 a.m. Tuesday witnessed a startling transformation. In the space of a minute, the four towering 350-foot-high, candy cane-striped smokestacks at Florida Power & Light's Port Everglades oil-burning power plant—a local landmark for the past half-century—abruptly imploded and crumbled into rubble.

The spectacular demolition, which was shown on live streaming video on the utility company's website, is the latest step in a $1.2 billion plan to replace the aging facility by 2016 with a new, state-of-the-art plant at the same site that will run on natural gas.