It was the place to see and be seen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Mandarin Oriental Hotel was once Miami\u2019s hottest spot, a place where celebrities stayed, and foodies flocked to restaurants such as La Mar and Azul. Now it\u2019s coming down, just 26 years after it was built.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Officials revealed their plans for the implosion of the hotel in Brickell Key to make way for a new and improved hotel.<\/p>\n
The implosion is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Sunday, and residents on Brickell Key will have to leave the island by 7 a.m. on implosion day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve already cleared out the insides to prepare the building for the implosion, which is actually called a \u201ccontrolled energetic felling.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s gonna have a big wow factor and I think everybody needs to know that there\u2019s as much an artistic component as there is an engineering component, so not only is it pretty to watch, but there\u2019s an awful lot of planning and engineering and choreography of explosives that come together to make this go successfully,\u201d said Ivy Fradin of the BG Group, the company doing the demolition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The dust will dissipate within minutes, and the debris, Fradin says, will stay within the footprint of the project.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The island will be shut down from 7:30 a.m. until roughly 1:30 p.m., depending on how soon the dust dissipates. No one is allowed onto or off the island, but the fire department is ready for any emergencies.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll be here on scene, we\u2019re gonna have eight units, we\u2019re also gonna have our fireboat on the water so in the event we do have a medical emergency, and we need to transport a patient, we\u2019ll be able to use our fireboat in case we need to so there\u2019s no delays in the transport,\u201d said Lt. Pete Sanchez of Miami Fire-Rescue.<\/p>\n
There are no restrictions on the mainland, anyone can watch the implosion safely from vantage points across the water.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anyone who lives within 800 feet of the building, in what they call the exclusion zone, is being asked to stay inside their apartments with windows and doors closed to protect their hearing during the blast.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGravity brings the building down so there\u2019s no flying debris, it\u2019s a progressive failure of the building coming down to ground level,\u201d Fradin explained.<\/p>\n
In the building\u2019s place, a new Mandarin Oriental will rise, with hotel rooms and residences.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Mandarin Oriental opened in 2000 but is being demolished to make way for The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, Miami, a two-tower ultra-luxury residential and hospitality development.<\/p>\n
The new development will feature a 66-story South Tower with 228 private residences and a 34-story North Tower with 70 private residences, 28 turnkey Hotel Collection residences, and 121 hotel guestrooms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was the place to see and be seen.\u00a0 The Mandarin Oriental Hotel was once Miami\u2019s hottest spot,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124,373],"class_list":{"0":"post-224240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-miami","8":"tag-miami","9":"tag-miami-headlines","10":"tag-miami-news","11":"tag-miami-dade-county"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}