Noida Supertech Twin Towers Demolition Updates: Residents of nearby societies allowed to return home

Almost everyone who took the Noida expressway on Saturday stopped for a brief while on the service lane. They whipped out cameras and phones and aimed their lenses at the tall Apex and Ceyane towers rising above the Noida skyline — one last time before they are razed to the ground at 2. 30 pm on Sunday. Among the crowd of shutterbugs was Riyansh Verma, all of 7. It was only last year that the Sector 126 resident had started a YouTube channel of his own. Having captured a few videos of the towers from various angles, he is now planning a timelapse clip on his channel. “Almost every day, I watched the twin towers’ coverage on news channels. So, I decided to see them one last time on Saturday before they are demolished. I know they were built illegally and will be demolished at 2. 30pm on Sunday. This will clear the view of the expressway for the residents living around the towers. After that, I will upload my video,” he told TOI.

With a prayer on their lips, and yet invigorated by the culmination of a legal victory that will see the twin towers go down on Sunday afternoon, residents of Emerald Court began packing their bags and leaving their houses. In the adjacent ATS Greens Village, a similar exercise was underway and will continue through the night and dawn. The societies in the immediate neighbourhood have to be evacuated by 7am. The common areas of both the societies were wrapped in plastic sheets — fountains, pools, lawns, plants, benches and so on — as were the balconies of the flats that will be in the firing line of the massive dust cloud that the demolition would kick up.

The twin towers— Apex (103 metres) and Ceyane (94 metres) — will be the tallest buildings inIndia whose implosion will be engineered, an exercise that needed six months of extensive preparation and unprecedented in terms of its scale and challenge as well as the quantum of explosives used to bring down a building in India. In the 2020 demolitions of illegal waterfront buildings at Maradu (Kochi), the only comparable exercise, around 1,600kg of explosives was used, according to reports. Families evacuated from their homes at Emerald Court and the adjacent ATS Greens Village through Saturday with balconies, common areas, swimming pools, lawns and benches all wrapped in plastic to protect them from the massive cloud of dust the twin towers’ collapse will generate. Though the evacuation deadline is 7am on Sunday, residents said both societies — comprising around 1,400 families — will empty out well in advance.

Since they started taking shape a decade ago, the hours after Saturday evening were the quietest around the twin towers. Once the selfietakers had departed, the TV cameras had powered down and droves of curious visitors had ebbed away, the towers stood in a warp of absolute stillness, appearing to wait solemnly for the end. Apex and Ceyane, the two towers built by Supertech in its Emerald Court compound in Sector 93A, will be broughtdown exactly at 2. 30pm on Sunday. The ‘waterfall implosion’ that will bring the buildings back to their foundations is a feat of engineering. It will be triggered by a series of synchronised charges that will blow up 3,700kg of explosives packed into the twin towers in such a way that they fall into their imprint and leave neighbouring buildings unscathed.