It took several tries and a bit of a scare to take down the second building from the former Imperial Sugar factory and refinery off Highway 90A in Sugar Land Sunday. As shown in more than a dozen YouTube videos, the metal bin building collapsed after the first blasts of dynamite shortly after 7 am, as planned. But the metal furnace house, directly adjacent to the brick char house, didn’t budge; getting it out of there turned out to be a little trickier. A second series of blasts (shown in the video above), set around 7:45, produced . . . well, not much. Then, maybe 40 minutes later, after most of the crowds had left and workers had gone inside the building to try to figure out what was wrong, and when the remaining onlookers least expected it, there was this frightening scene:

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Johnson Development Corp. general manager Shay Shafie tells 11 News reporter Courtney Zubowski that the workers “started [to] hear the metal creaking, knew the building was starting to fall and were able to get out with plenty of time.” No ghosts of sugar past stuck in the rubble?

A few videos of the initial blasts only:

So much excitement! Will it be enough to help these buildings win the Swamplot Award they’ve already been nominated for?

• Implosion at historic Sugar Land refinery nearly goes awry [11 News]
• End of Architectural Era in Sugar Land [MyFox Houston]
• Previously on Swamplot: Sugar Land Sugar Box Implosions Back on for This Sunday, The New Sugar Land: More Land, Less Sugar

Videos: YouTube users 2zmom2, yrvberry, Marc Brubaker, trvogt2, MrSbonaventura