Downing the Georgia Dome…

Famous sports stadium to fall before January 2018.

Demolition of the Georgia Dome will be completed before college football’s national championship game comes to the new Falcons stadium next door in January 2018, according to a schedule outlined for a state board Tuesday.

Leaders of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium construction team told the Georgia World Congress Center Authority board that they are close to choosing a demolition contractor for the Dome and expect to begin salvaging materials from the building in March and to implode it by the fall of 2017.

“There’s a couple different approaches that are being considered … most likely looking at either a single implosion or multiple implosions,” said Wayne Wadsworth, principal in charge of Mercedes-Benz Stadium general contractor Holder Hunt Russell Moody.

The Georgia Dome is the home stadium for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and Georgia State University. It opened in 1992 as the largest cable-supported domed stadium in the world, is located in downtown Atlanta. The Dome was the host to Super Bowl XXVIII and XXXIV, host of the gymnastics and basketball events for the 1996 Olympic Games.

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