The iron balance weight hit the concrete bottom of the hoist pit eighty feet below with a shattering, earth-shaking CRASH that echoed off the brick walls of the grain elevator like an exploding boiler.
The five-hundred-pound cast-iron balance weight dropped through eighty feet of upright gloom like an anvil, trailing frayed hemp filaments that hissed against the hoist guides. It struck the concrete sump in the grease pit. Then, the high-pressure buffer failed, exploding forty years of piled up black sludge across the lower stonework in a foul, greasy spray.
The load-bearing reaction was immediate and total. Cut from its upper mid-air brackets, the external iron cage ladder peeled away from the brick facade. Anchor bolts forged before the war groaned in their sockets, their lead sleeves shearing through the lime mortar with a series of sharp, whip-like cracks. The entire eighty-foot iron structure warped, twisted under its own dead weight, and fell outward into the night, crashing into the gravel rail siding in a tangled ruin of buckled stringers, shattered rungs, and crushed stonework. The only external stairs leading to the roof had been wiped out in two seconds. That left an eighty-foot sheer drop of slick brickwork between the roof ledges and the railway gravel.
