Historic 44-year-old hotel-casino now a 30-foot pile of rubble

Cathy Scott

Tuesday, Nov. 26, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

The Sands hotel-casino is history.

At 2:06 a.m. today, the circular hotel-casino, once the playground for a group of entertainers dubbed the "Rat Pack," was razed by a demolition crew.

After a countdown from 10, there were seven dynamite blasts, and the 44-year-old, 17-story tower collapsed into a 30-foot-high pile of rubble. The whole thing took 10 seconds.

The implosion went off without a hitch, said Metro Police officers and Nevada Highway Patrol troopers who kept people from getting too close. No injuries were reported.

The only inconveniences were to motorists and pedestrians as police closed off Las Vegas Boulevard at Spring Mountain and Flamingo roads.

Workers with Controlled Demolition Inc. of Phoenix, Md., leveled the tower with what company President Mark Loizeaux described as a "no-frills" implosion.

A $1.8 billion, 6,000-room Venetian-themed hotel-casino will break ground on the Sands site early next year.

Sara Howell stayed up to watch the implosion, along with thousands of other spectators, even though she needed to be ready in a few hours to attend a college course.

"It was so cool," Howell said. "I have a calculus class in the morning, but it was worth staying up for. You heard it, you saw it, you smelled it. It was awesome."

Richard and Kay Randolph were in town from Lake Stevens, Wash., to visit relatives for Thanksgiving. It wasn't until Monday morning that they found out about this morning's festivities.

"I just had to get up and come watch this," said Kay Randolph, who arrived more than an hour early to secure a prime viewing spot behind a barricade across the street from the Sands. "I thought it was very cool, very different."

Hundreds of spectators could be seen peering out of their high-rise rooms inside nearby hotels.

Madeline Knapp watched the implosion with her parents and sister, who were visiting from Long Island, N.Y.

"We've got connections," she noted because of their location on top of the Treasure Island hotel-casino's parking garage with a vantage point across the street from the Sands.

She said it was her father's idea to watch the implosion up close instead of on TV. Three local television stations carried the implosion live.

"He's the one who yanked us out of bed to come here," Knapp said.

For five UNLV film students and Film Society members who videotaped the event, the scene served as a future school project. It's the second implosion of a Las Vegas hotel-casino the group has filmed.

"I shot the Dunes," said Dominick Trutanich. "I didn't get the Landmark."

The Dunes hotel-casino was demolished Oct. 27, 1994. The Landmark was razed Nov. 7, 1995. The Hacienda hotel-casino is scheduled to be imploded at 9 p.m. on New Year's Eve.

For the students, the implosion was extremely visual, said Josh Ruthaford.

"It was cool," Ruthaford said. "Anything blowing up is cool."

But to Joe Stelzer, who was visiting with his wife from Phoenix, the crumbling of the Sands looked like "a mistake."

"I anticipated it would go straight down," he said. "It fell back. I think they made a mistake. It surprised me."

Still, he described the scene as "a first for me."

"This was the highlight of our trip. We stayed up to see it," he said.

SUN COPY EDITOR Rob Langrell contributed to this story.