As the sun rose over Lake Charles Saturday morning, its lakefront was slowly filling with spectators. A husband poured his wife a cup of coffee from a green, metal canister as she pulled a plaid blanket over their laps. Another family brought lawn chairs and passed a box of donuts between them as they sat in a semi-circle facing the Event Center. A pair of teenage boys tossed a football back and forth across the hill behind Millennium Park. The thousands who would ultimately arrive were there to witness history — the implosion of the Capital One Tower.

“It’s a big deal and it’s something we wanted to be here for,” said Alex Reeser — a lifelong Lake Charles resident who watched the implosion with his wife, Rachel, and their two daughters in the parking area parallel to the Rosa Hart Theatre lobby.

The family of four arrived at about 5:45 a.m.

“I go to church downtown and I always drive past the tower every Sunday morning,” Rachel said. “It’s going to look quite different this Sunday, for sure.”

Kinshasa Brantley, a Houston native who is a recent transplant to Lake Charles, watched from the Jury Duty parking lot diagonal to the Event Center’s front entrance.

“I haven’t been living here long, but it’s seems like such a staple of the city and such a significant part of the landscape,” she said. “It’s sad to see it go. The building is not that old and I’m sure the people who put hard work and labor into that, I’m sure it’s very sentimental for them to see it go.”

Lake Charles Police and Fire Department set up a command unit near the front lawn of the Event Center, using their PA systems to give a one-minute-before-implosion warning to spectators. Then a fire truck blared its horn 55 seconds later before a countdown from nine could be heard over the system.

It took eight seconds for the detonators within the building to go off and five seconds for the tower to collapse within itself.

“I’m sure it took years to be built and for it to be gone in just seconds, that’s just amazing,” said Brantley, who made herself cozy in a foldable chair, jacket and hat as she prepared herself against the cold front that arrived late Friday night. “I’m glad I didn’t miss it.”

Jacob Cardiff of Iowa, La., brought his almost-8-year-old son, Asher, to watch the implosion. Cardiff is a veteran and he proudly told those around him that his son was born on Veterans Day.

“I have first-hand experience with an implosion bigger than this from when I served in Iraq,” he said. “We were taking fire from a 30-story building for about three days and we got sick of it so the Air Force flew over and dropped a 500-pound bomb on it.”

Cardiff said he has been describing what that experience was like to his son and wanted to be here for the tower’s implosion so his son could gather the nature of what his father described.

“I wanted him to have this experience,” he said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You don’t get to see this kind of stuff all the time and I wanted my kid to have that experience.”

A dust plume rose above the debris after the tower’s collapse, moving like a sand storm through the Event Center parking lot, covering spectators and their vehicles in dirt.

It made Asher giddy.

“I got dirt in my eyes and I was like, ‘Whooo,’ ” he exclaimed. “I wish, though, that they had put fireworks inside it so when they lit it it would go ‘boom’ with colors shooting out of the top.”