Jack Loizeaux; Pioneer in Razing Buildings by Implosion

Jack Loizeaux, a demolition expert who was a pioneer of implosion--the use of explosives to collapse unwanted structures--has died.

He was 85 and died Nov. 28 in Baltimore of a stroke.

Loizeaux was a sort of architect in reverse, whose list of “shots,” as implosions are called in the demolition trade, included major urban eyesores as well as landmark structures--several of Las Vegas’ most fabled hotels among them.

Legendary in the world of rugged entrepreneurs that he helped to create, Loizeaux was a deliberate, soft-spoken and deeply religious man who saw a spiritual dimension in the destruction he wrought at others’ behest.

“He was the best in the world,” said Stan Rhyu, former blasting administrator for the state of California, where Loizeaux was the expert called in to demolish, among other things, the old Dumbarton Bridge in Northern California in 1984 and the Olive View Medical Center after the 1971 San Fernando quake.

Loizeaux’s firm also razed the Hacienda, Landmark, Aladdin, Sands and Dunes hotels in Las Vegas. Other projects included destroying burning oil rigs, radioactive walls in nuclear reactors, missile silos and other Cold War castoffs.

Loizeaux saw his work as a science and an art whose success hinged on two things: gravity and the Lord.

“Anything standing vertically wants to fall,” Loizeaux once told an interviewer. “The Lord made gravity, and if you knock out something’s supports, it’s got only one way to go--down.”

That, in essence, is the logic behind implosion, a gentler, more marketable term than explosion. It was a physics term that the Loizeaux family says was introduced to the demolition business in the 1950s by Loizeaux’s first wife, Freddie, a licensed blaster who died in 1992.

Loizeaux would study a building’s innards, comparing the blueprints (which often lied) with the actual structure. Then he would conceive a plan that would use the building’s weight against itself, employing timed charges at strategic points to weaken a structure so its own mass would be its downfall. He strove to use as few explosives as possible.

Implosions have become the stuff of prime-time entertainment, with buildings crumbling on themselves in a precise ballet of destruction. If done well, the techniques perfected by pioneers such as Loizeaux will drop a building into its own base without damaging surrounding structures.

Loizeaux was born in Towson, Md., the seventh and youngest son of Alfred S. Loizeaux, chief engineer for Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. The father was also a farmer who liked to transplant orchard trees with the help of a little dynamite, believing that the nitrogen left in the soil by the blast would fertilize it and produce much bigger trees.

His interests were picked up by his son, who became a forestry student at the University of Georgia. While studying there, the youngest Loizeaux met a visitor named Mr. Johnson from DuPont Co., who told his class that he was going to straighten a bend in Georgia’s Oconee River with explosives. Loizeaux witnessed the feat and was left with a lasting impression of “the awesome power of dynamite.”

He served in World War II as a wood and materials expert, then went to night school in engineering. In the late 1940s he entered the tree business, which often called for removing stumps along sidewalks. Remembering Mr. Johnson, he shunned shovels for dynamite to take out the stumps.

Soon he graduated to bigger targets. He blew out rocks, helping to excavate a harbor in Chile. He took down smokestacks, treating five tall brick chimneys at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland like the tree stumps he had blasted with ease. Eventually, he moved on to buildings.

In the late 1950s he received a call from Washington, D.C., to level some old eight-story apartment buildings next to the State Department that were blocking the view of the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Loizeaux’s first shot took the structures down to seven stories. His second knocked them down a little more. On his third try, he succeeded in dropping the buildings to the ground. A business was born.

In 1960 he founded Controlled Demolition Inc. He caught the attention of the demolition world the following year when he dynamited 300 feet of curbing in six hours without damaging the adjoining pavement.

But the job that put him on the map was the destruction of the 600-room Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1972, then the biggest building ever razed with explosives. The next year Engineering News-Record, a prominent trade publication, hailed him for elevating demolition to an art and said he “pioneered the use of explosives to demolish just about everything built by man.”

At demolition sites, Loizeaux shunned the spotlight, letting the mayor or other official push a phony plunger while he stood off to the side. Always he would say a prayer before the button was pushed.

That might have struck some as corny or fake, but it was, said Michael R. Taylor, executive director of the National Assn. of Demolition Contractors, “just something Jack did. He was not pretentious at all.”

Loizeaux retired in 1980 and turned the firm over to his sons, Mark and Douglas, by whom he is survived, in addition to his wife of four years, the former Betty Burman; two daughters; a brother; a sister; 13 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.