Dust choked downtown for nearly 20 minutes, blocking out the sun and leaving a layer of film on cars, streets and storefronts. The dust cloud reached nearly as high as the top of the Bank of America Tower and drifted northwest about 8 miles an hour.

---(snip)---

Carefully placed explosives - 4,461 pounds in all - collapsed the 25,000-ton roof like a cake taken out of the oven too soon. More than 21 miles of detonating cord exploded in a flash. The Dome's roof ribs and columns looked like they had been electrified with lightning.

Rapid puffs of smoke followed, and the massive roof ribs that formed the Dome's 20 arches buckled first in three pie-shaped wedges. Then came the remaining three roof wedges, followed instantly by explosions in the support columns and in the roof's tension ring, which had held the roof together by exerting 8 million pounds of force around its base.

While nearly all of the Dome, which once weighed about 130,000 tons, collapsed in on its own "footprint," chunks of concrete flew onto rooftops. The force of the blasts broke windows at the Salvation Army and Turner Construction buildings on Fourth Avenue South, and at F.X. McRory's steakhouse on South King Street. Residents of the nearby Florentine Condominiums had been taken to the restaurant earlier that morning, but no one was injured.

A small army of street sweepers went into action moments after the blast. Businesses around the Dome were quick to reopen, with little damage reported. Engineers will survey adjacent buildings and structures over the next few days to assess any damage.

The implosion registered a magnitude 2.3 on the Richter scale - a barely detectable ground motion that naturally visits the region once or twice a month. Scientists will use ground-vibration data from the implosion to learn more about the Seattle fault, which runs a few blocks south of the Kingdome.

By afternoon, the job of pulverizing and hauling away the Kingdome was under way, with hydraulic jackhammers breaking columns into chunks. A couple hundred people gathered close to the site, taking pictures and searching for bits of the building to take home.

The rubble is flatter than expected, only reaching about 30 feet high near the perimeter of the 9-acre Dome site. The Dome once stood 250 feet high.

(9:26 a.m.): Rookie FAA Manager Bans All Take Offs Nationwide, Including Most Military Flights? Mineta Asserts He Issues Order Minutes Later

FAA Administrator Jane Garvey. [Source: FAA]

Time magazine later reports that Jane Garvey, head of the FAA, "almost certainly after getting an okay from the White House, initiate[s] a national ground stop, which forbids takeoffs and requires planes in the air to get down as soon as is reasonable. The order, which has never been implemented since flying was invented in 1903, applie[s] to virtually every single kind of machine that can takeoff–civilian, military, or law enforcement." Military and law enforcement flights are allowed to resume at 10:31 a.m. (see 10:31 a.m.) A limited number of military flights–the FAA will not reveal details–are allowed to fly during this ban. [Time, 9/14/2001] Garvey later calls it "a national ground stop ... that prevented any aircraft from taking off." [US Congress, 9/21/2001] Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta later says he was the one to give the order: "As soon as I was aware of the nature and scale of the attack, I called from the White House to order the air traffic system to land all aircraft, immediately and without exception." [US Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, 9/20/2001] According to Mineta, "At approximately 9:45 ... I gave the FAA the final order for all civil aircraft to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible." [9/11 Commission, 5/23/2003] At the time, 4,452 planes are flying in the continental US. A later account states that Ben Sliney, the FAA’s National Operations Manager, makes the decision without consulting his superiors, like Jane Garvey, first. It would be remarkable if Sliney was the one to make the decision, because 9/11 is Sliney’s first day on the job as National Operations Manager, "the chess master of the air traffic system." [USA Today, 8/13/2002] When he accepted the job a couple of months earlier, he had asked, "What is the limit of my authority?" The man who had promoted him replied, "Unlimited." [USA Today, 8/13/2002] Yet another account, by Linda Schuessler, manager of tactical operations at the FAA Command Center where Sliney was located, says, "... it was done collaboratively ... All these decisions were corporate decisions. It wasn’t one person who said, ‘Yes, this has got to get done.’"[Aviation Week and Space Technology, 12/17/2001] About 500 planes land in the next 20 minutes, and then much more urgent orders to land are issued at 9:45 a.m. (see (9:45 a.m.)). [USA Today, 8/13/2002; Time, 9/14/2001; USA Today, 8/13/2002; US Congress, 9/21/2001; Aviation Week and Space Technology, 6/3/2002; Newsday, 9/23/2001; Associated Press, 8/19/2002; Newsday, 9/10/2002]

Entity Tags: Jane Garvey, Ben Sliney, Norman Mineta, Federal Aviation Administration, Linda Schuessler

9:30 a.m.: United Flights Are Instructed to Land Immediately; American Follows Suit

Entity Tags: United Airlines, American Airlines

(9:45 a.m.): Senior FAA Manager, on His First Day on the Job, Orders All Planes Out of the Sky Nationwide

FAA National Operations Manager Ben Sliney. [Source: Publicity photo]

Ben Sliney, FAA’s National Operations Manager, orders the entire nationwide air traffic system shut down. All flights at US airports are stopped. Around 3,950 flights are still in the air. Sliney makes the decision without consulting FAA head Jane Garvey, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, or other bosses, but they quickly approve his actions. It’s Sliney’s first day on the job. [USA Today, 8/13/2002; USA Today, 8/13/2002; MSNBC, 9/22/2001; CNN, 9/12/2001; New York Times, 9/12/2001; Associated Press, 8/12/2002; Associated Press, 8/19/2002; Newsday, 9/10/2002; USA Today, 8/13/2002; Washington Post, 9/12/2001] Seventy-five percent of the planes land within one hour of the order. [USA Today, 8/12/2002] The 9/11 Commission will later remark that this "was an unprecedented order" that the "air traffic control system handled ... with great skill." [9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 29] The Washington Post has reported that Mineta told Monty Belger at the FAA: "Monty, bring all the planes down," even adding, "[Expletive] pilot discretion." [Washington Post, 1/27/2002] However, it is later reported by a different Post reporter that Mineta did not even know of the order until 15 minutes later. This reporter "says FAA officials had begged him to maintain the fiction." [Slate, 4/2/2002]

Entity Tags: Federal Aviation Administration, Norman Mineta, Jane Garvey, Monty Belger, Ben Sliney

(After 9:55 a.m.): Langley Fighters Receive Vague Order to Protect White House

Entity Tags: Craig Borgstrom, Secret Service

10:31 a.m.: Military and Law Enforcement Flights Resume

Entity Tags: Federal Aviation Administration

10:31 a.m.: NEADS Does Not Pass Along NORAD Shootdown Order

Entity Tags: Richard ("Dick") Cheney, Northeast Air Defense Sector, Larry Arnold